Nunnery (in Ruins), Kilmacahill, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Religious Houses
The name on the old Ordnance Survey map says 'Nunnery (in Ruins)', but there were never any nuns here.
What lies in a wet Westmeath field is the ghost of a Franciscan friary, mislabelled by cartographers who apparently confused it with a nunnery at Kinard some distance away. The error was printed, distributed, and repeated, and so this small rise of limestone outcrop has carried the wrong identity ever since. What survives is modest enough: grass-covered banks and footings, the faint outline of a rectangular church roughly 24 metres long and just over 9 metres wide, with a northern extension that may once have functioned as a transept. No facing stones remain. Two gaps in the southern and western walls may be where doors once stood. The internal mounding, where the earth humps slightly, is most likely collapsed rubble rather than deliberate construction.
The friary belonged to the Third Order of St Francis, a branch of the Franciscan movement whose members often lived in smaller, less elaborate communities than the great mendicant houses of the towns. It was founded by the Petit family, Anglo-Norman barons who had been granted the barony of Magheradernon in the late twelfth century by Hugh de Lacy, lord of Meath. The foundation did not survive the Reformation intact. The friary was dissolved in 1540, and by 1548 its farm, valued at 26 shillings and 8 pence, had been sold to one Edmund Nugent. The lands then passed to the Nangle family of Ballysax in County Kildare. In 1611, Robert Nangle formally surrendered the site to the Crown, and the document recording that transaction gives a quietly detailed picture of what remained: ruinous church walls, a small churchyard, five cottages, forty acres of arable land, twelve of pasture, and three of moor. Beyond the main ruin, faint earthworks to the north and east may mark where the domestic buildings of the friary once stood, and traces of old field boundaries survive on the higher ground nearby.