Quakers Meeting House, Cartronkeel, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ecclesiastical Sites
What remains of the Quaker meeting house at Moate is, in architectural terms, almost nothing: a single stretch of rubble-built wall, seven metres long and three metres high, with an arched doorway at its centre.
Yet this southern wall, sitting within a burial ground on a slight rise about 150 metres north of Moate's main street, carries three stone plaques that together tell a compressed history of construction, revival, and deliberate erasure. One of them records that the building was "taken down by order of Dublin meeting 1921", a quiet administrative phrase that somehow makes the demolition feel more final than if it had simply fallen down.
The original meeting house was built in 1694 by John Clibborn of Moate Castle, a member of a Quaker family whose influence in this part of County Westmeath was considerable. The Quakers, formally known as the Religious Society of Friends, built plain, functional meeting houses rather than churches, and the simplicity of what survives here is consistent with that tradition. The building was substantially rebuilt in 1768, as a lozenge-shaped plaque on the wall records, and the Clibborn family continued to be central to the town's development well into the nineteenth century, alongside other Quaker families including the Homans and the Robinsons. Their collective presence shaped much of Moate's commercial and civic growth during that period. The meeting house itself was largely demolished around 1930, some years after the 1921 order, leaving the burial ground and this single wall as the principal physical evidence of a once-active community.
The wall and its plaques stand within the burial ground and are visible from the approach from the main street. The doorway opening, just over two metres wide and two and a quarter metres high, is large enough to give a clear sense of the scale the original building might have had, even as the rest of it is entirely absent.