Old Catholic Church, Beagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
What survives of this old Catholic chapel in Beagh, near Kilconly in north Galway, amounts to little more than a scatter of mortared stones in the ground.
No walls rise above the surface, no outline interrupts the grass, and nothing announces that a building ever stood here at all. It is the kind of place that registers only if you already know to look for it.
The chapel's existence is confirmed by the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which recorded it as a rectangular structure aligned east to west, a typical orientation for a Christian place of worship, with the altar end facing the rising sun. It stood roughly fifty metres south of a separate ecclesiastical building that still features in the archaeological record for the area. That proximity suggests a cluster of religious activity at this spot, though the precise date of the chapel's construction or its abandonment is not recorded. By the time surveyors came to document what remained, the building had already dissolved almost entirely into the landscape, leaving only those few mortared stones as evidence that it once existed.