There is nothing else to see, no wall, no arch, no earthwork, yet the ground itself keeps insisting that something was once here. That something, according to local memory, was a monastery, and before the community packed up and relocated to Tipperary, it left behind, of all things, a plum garden. That garden was reportedly still visible until relatively recently, though no surface trace of it now remains. The slate keeps coming up regardless.

The site is most likely that of a Franciscan house recorded under the name 'Beagh in the barony of Clare'. By 1585, when it appears in the historical record, it was already described as a 'ruined chapel or cell', suggesting the community had long since departed by that point. The Franciscans, a mendicant order founded in the thirteenth century and well established across Connacht, often built modest, functional houses rather than grand complexes, which may partly explain why so little has survived above ground. The detail about the plum garden is a small but telling one: monastic communities frequently cultivated orchards and gardens both for sustenance and as an extension of their ordered, contemplative life, and such features could persist for centuries after the buildings themselves had gone.

For anyone passing through this part of north Galway, there is genuinely nothing to observe at the surface. The interest lies entirely in the idea of the place, in what the churned-up slate implies about what lies beneath, and in the quiet strangeness of a monastery that has left almost no physical record except the occasional shard turned up by a ploughshare.