Templegal, Derrydonnell More, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Churches & Chapels

Templegal, Derrydonnell More, Co. Galway

Three corbels are almost all that distinguishes this ruin from a random scatter of stone.

Corbels are projecting blocks built into a wall to carry the weight of a beam or floor above, and in this case two sit on the internal face of the western gable while a third occupies the south-west corner. Together they indicate that the church once had a loft at its western end, a detail that would be entirely invisible to a casual visitor picking their way through the ivy and briars. That small structural clue is now among the most legible things left in a building that measures roughly twelve metres east to west and just under six metres across, with walls surviving in places to no great height and reduced elsewhere to fragments of a metre or two.

The church sits at the centre of an ecclesiastical enclosure in Derrydonnell More, and it was built using very large thin limestone flags bonded together with a mortared rubble core, a technique that gives the surviving sections of the western gable and northern side-wall a slightly monumental character despite the general state of collapse. The site was noted by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp in 1919 and again by O'Flanagan in 1927, which suggests it was already in a ruinous condition by the time serious attention was paid to it. The interior tells a longer story in miniature: the western end is heaped up with collapsed stonework, the eastern end has been swallowed almost entirely by thorn and briar, and among the growth a graveslab dated 1840 survives. A table-tomb of probable nineteenth-century date has been constructed along the line of the southern side-wall, effectively borrowing the ruins as a boundary for a later burial, which is a not uncommon practice at sites that retained local religious significance long after the building itself ceased to function.

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