On the eastern slope of Ballynagallagh Hill in County Limerick, within easy sight of Lough Gur to the north, there was once a medieval nunnery whose physical remains had already been reduced to a single fragment of west gable by the time the Ordnance Survey officers came to record it in 1840. That fragment, they noted, stood 14 feet high, 9 feet broad, and 3½ feet thick, built of irregularly sized stones set in lime and sand mortar. Today, even that remnant has been absorbed into the wall of the later graveyard that grew up around the site, and what you are looking at, without knowing the history, reads simply as an old field boundary.

The nunnery was reputedly founded by the Fitzgibbon family in 1283, and it was a daughter house of St. Peter's Cell in Limerick City, itself established in 1171 by Donal Mór O'Brien, King of Limerick, for the Black Nuns of the Order of St. Augustine, a contemplative order whose members followed the Rule of St. Augustine rather than the stricter enclosure of some other medieval women's houses. Historians have long tangled over the site's identity. Ware in 1705, Croker in 1833, and Dowd in 1896 all mistakenly attributed it to a dedication to St. Catherine for the Canonesses of St. Augustine, confusing it with a separate foundation, St. Catherine de O'Conyl. The actual Ballynagallagh house was dissolved around 1540 to 1541 under the general Dissolution of the Monasteries, at which point the records describe its lands, some 60 acres in total across two holdings, as lying waste due to the rebellion of O'Brien. In 1541, King Henry VIII granted a 21-year lease over the site to one Edmund Sexton of Limerick, bundling it together with the urban house of St. Peter in Limerick.

The graveyard at Ballynagallagh remains in use, and the medieval wall section is incorporated into its western boundary, so access to the exterior of the site is straightforward, though the interior is a functioning burial ground and should be approached accordingly. One further trace of the nunnery has travelled: a stone stoup, the small basin used to hold holy water at a church entrance, was removed from the site and built into the pier of an entrance at St. Patrick's Roman Catholic Church, where it now forms part of the approach to a modern cemetery on the south side of the church grounds. The early Ordnance Survey six-inch map, if you can consult it, shows the medieval building as a square tower at the north-west angle of the burial ground, which gives a useful sense of how much has been lost in the intervening two centuries.