Old Chapel, Wallscourt, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
On the western edge of Kilreekill village in County Galway, a stretch of graveyard turf covers what was once a distinct ecclesiastical building, now so thoroughly gone that graves have taken its place.
By 1933, the Ordnance Survey was already marking it as a ruin; by the time anyone thought to document what remained, even the ruin had been dismantled and carted off as building material. There is nothing left to see, which is precisely what makes it worth knowing about.
The chapel was dedicated to St Richella, a figure identified in some sources as possibly a sister of either St Patrick or St Finnian, and thus connected, however tentatively, to the foundational generation of Irish Christianity. The 1838 edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map shows it as a roofed structure aligned roughly east to west, sitting immediately south of a later Catholic chapel, the two buildings separated by a graveyard boundary wall. By that same year, however, the structure had already been reduced to a single wall of about ten metres in length, described at the time as looking "apparently modern," meaning it had likely been patched or partially rebuilt at some point. Set into this wall was a pointed archway, built from rough stones and lime-and-sand mortar, standing roughly 2.7 metres high and 2.1 metres wide at its base. That arch, by all accounts the last physical remnant of whatever the original chapel had been, was subsequently knocked down, and the stone reused elsewhere. Local memory preserved the fact of its demolition, but not when it happened or by whom.
The site today is absorbed into the graveyard that surrounds the later church at Kilreekill, with no surface trace of the old chapel remaining. The graves that now occupy the area offer no indication that an older, separately dedicated building once stood beneath and around them.