Old Chapel, Ashfield Demesne, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Old Chapel, Ashfield Demesne, Co. Galway

At the northern edge of Shanaglish village in County Galway, a graveyard holds almost nothing of the chapel that once stood within it.

Three stone steps survive, which local knowledge identifies as the approach to the church entrance, and that is very nearly all. The building has not merely fallen or been cleared; it has effectively dissolved from the landscape, leaving the steps behind like a sentence with everything but the first word removed.

The 1838 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the structure under the name "Old Chapel" and depicts it as an L-shaped building, a detail that suggests some architectural ambition, or at least a more complex footprint than a plain rectangular nave. At the northern end of the graveyard there is also a moulded jambstone, a carved architectural fragment from the surround of a doorway or window, which may have come from the chapel itself. Jambstones of this kind were load-bearing or decorative elements flanking an opening, and their moulded profiles can sometimes help date or place a building within a broader tradition of ecclesiastical construction. This one, however, has been repurposed. It appears to mark a grave, which gives it a quietly doubled existence: a piece of one structure now serving as a monument within the ground that surrounds what remains of another.

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