Religious house, Clonbroney, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Religious Houses

Religious house, Clonbroney, Co. Longford

In County Longford, a medieval nunnery was quietly dismantled in the nineteenth century and used to build a bridge.

What remains of Clonbroney's religious house sits on the highest point of a low hill, within a graveyard, reduced to grass-covered wall-footings measuring roughly 13 metres east to west and just over 8 metres north to south. The walls themselves, where they can still be traced, are about 84 centimetres thick. A possible cross lies to the southeast. For a community that was once significant enough to have its abbesses recorded in the Irish annals across more than two centuries, the physical legacy is strikingly slight.

The nunnery of Cluain Bronaich, meaning something close to "the meadow of Bronaich", is mentioned in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick, one of the early medieval texts compiled in honour of Ireland's patron saint. Deaths of abbesses are entered in the annals from 933 until 1163, after which the community appears to fade from the documentary record. By the late fourteenth century, the site had shifted in character: in 1397, a man named Denis Odunchun is recorded as its perpetual vicar, and in 1444 one Marcus Oforgail was appointed to the same role, suggesting it had long since become a parish church rather than a functioning nunnery. A church building was still visible enough to be depicted on an early seventeenth-century map of Granard barony. The ruins that survived into the nineteenth century did not last much longer. A survey carried out in 1944 recorded the local account that the remaining stonework had been taken away to construct a nearby bridge, a fate that was far from unusual for rural ecclesiastical remains during that period. By 1982, what could be identified on the ground was a rectangular footprint aligned east to west, with the western end partly obscured by stones dumped during earlier clearance, and a slight irregularity in the northern wall suggesting a second structure may once have stood immediately to the east.

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