Religious house, Inis Gé Theas, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Religious Houses
On Inishkea South, a small island off the Mayo coast, three conjoined stone enclosures sit in rough, stone-strewn pasture without offering any real explanation of themselves.
No carved stonework, no dressed doorways, no windows, no inscriptions. The walls are rubble, the interior features amount to cultivation ridges and a few tumbled slabs. The only documentary label applied to the site comes from the 1921 Ordnance Survey map, which marks it as 'Nunnery (site of)', a designation that appears nowhere in historical records and cannot currently be verified or explained.
The three enclosures are arranged on a rough north-south alignment and are notably unequal in scale. The northernmost, the best-preserved of the group, has rubble walls still standing between 1.2 and 1.6 metres in height, with a gap near the north end of the west wall wide enough to serve as an entrance. Tucked into its south-east quadrant is a smaller, poorly preserved enclosure that connects to the larger space through a break in the shared wall; within it lies a worked stone, possibly a rough-out for a quern stone, the kind of disc used for hand-grinding grain. A third, larger enclosure is appended to the south and appears to be later in date than the other two; its walls are more roughly built and partly collapsed, and it has no internal connection to the enclosures abutting it to the north. Notably, none of this appears on the 1838 six-inch Ordnance Survey map, suggesting the site either escaped the surveyors' attention or was not considered significant at that time. A leacht, known as Laghta Wirraid, sits about 170 metres to the south-east along the old trackway. A leacht is a low commemorative stone cairn associated with early Christian devotional practice, and its proximity adds to the sense that this corner of the island carried some form of ritual or religious significance. Local tradition associates the site with Saint Kea, though no documentary sources connect the two. The enclosures have been modified for farming use in the modern era, which complicates any attempt to read the original layout, and the question of what exactly was founded here, by whom, and when, remains genuinely open.