Wall monument, Ross, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Religious Objects
Tucked into the lower portion of a single-light window in a small passage off the inner cloister walk of Ross Friary, a broken stone slab sits in what may not even be its original position.
Roughly half a metre wide and just under half a metre tall, the monument has fractured into four pieces, with portions now lost entirely. It is easy to overlook, not least because it occupies a spot that seems almost incidental, as though it was slotted into the window opening as an afterthought rather than placed with ceremony.
The slab commemorates Fr Nally and carries the date 1687, which places it in a particularly fraught period for Catholic religious life in Ireland. Ross Friary, a Franciscan house on the shore of Lough Corrib in County Galway, had been suppressed during the Reformation and changed hands repeatedly across the seventeenth century, yet members of the order continued to return to the site. A wall monument of this kind would typically have been fixed to a vertical surface within a church or cloister to mark a burial or offer a memorial prayer; the fact that this one may have been moved from its original location suggests the friary's interior arrangements shifted considerably over the years of use, abandonment, and partial reoccupation that characterised the period. That Fr Nally was commemorated at all in 1687, in a house with such an unsettled history, quietly reflects how persistently the community maintained its presence there.