Religious house - Knights Templars, Liberties Of Carlingford, Co. Louth
Co. Louth |
Religious Houses
On the lower slopes of the Carlingford Mountains, above the medieval port town and looking out over the lough, a place known as Roosky preserves what may be the remains of a Knights Templar foundation.
The Templars, a military-religious order founded in the twelfth century to protect Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, held properties across Ireland and Britain, and this site on the Liberties of Carlingford is tentatively counted among them. What survives above ground is modest: roughly twenty metres of the church's north wall still stand, along with about eight and a half metres of the west gable. The rest has collapsed or been reduced to low grass-covered mounds, but the footprint of a small and purposeful community is still legible in the ground.
The most carefully worked piece of surviving stonework is the granite lintel from the original doorway, which now lies on the ground just south-west of where it once sat. It is a substantial piece, 2.16 metres long and 0.74 metres wide, and it was not simply dressed flat; the mason cut it back along most of its length so that the thicker extremities could serve as the upper portions of the doorjambs, effectively making lintel and jamb-heads from a single stone. Its face is decorated with two shallow incised lines running along the border, a detail that speaks to considered craft rather than plain utility. The church itself was built from uncoursed rubble greywacke and granite, and was probably around twenty metres long in total. Evidence of a cross-wall survives fourteen metres east of the gable, and just beyond that there are faint traces of what may have been a chancel, roughly six metres square. To the west and north-west of the church, the domestic range of the priory survives as two large rectangular enclosures buried under turf, the larger measuring approximately twenty-seven metres by ten metres. The open area to the north of the church may once have held a cloister, though if so it was perhaps built of timber, leaving nothing behind. A souterrain, an underground stone-built passage of a type found at many early Irish sites, lies to the north-west of the priory complex, suggesting the ground around Roosky was already in use long before the Templars, or whoever founded this house, arrived.