Wall monument, Portumna Demesne, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Religious Objects
Set into the north wall of the chancel at Portumna's friary church, a small stone monument carries an inscription that manages to feel both intimate and quietly defiant.
Carved in relief on a framed panel just under two feet square, the text asks the reader to pray for the souls of two specific people, named, located, and married, who arranged their own commemoration and explicitly extended it to their descendants. The monument is not a grand dynastic statement; it is a practical act, the kind made by people who understood that memory needs a little help to survive.
The inscription names Brassell Maddin of Creggin and his wife Katherin Keogh, and records that they raised the monument themselves in 1688. That date is not an incidental detail. Ireland in 1688 was on the edge of the Williamite War, a conflict that would reshape land ownership and religious life across the country within a few years. Commissioning a carved memorial in a friary church at that particular moment, and doing so in one's own lifetime rather than leaving it to heirs, suggests a degree of urgency or at least clear-eyed realism about the future. Portumna Friary is a Dominican house, founded in the early seventeenth century, and its chancel would have been a prestigious location for such a monument. The Maddin monument sits immediately east of the doorway leading to the sacristy, paired with a second monument lower on the same wall, the two together forming a modest but deliberate cluster of commemoration in a space already charged with liturgical significance.
