Templemurry, Ceathrú An Lisín, Co. Galway

Teampall Mhuire stood just across the road from where the modern Catholic church now sits at the centre of the island, and was still in use as recently as the mid-nineteenth century, before being pulled down in 1939. What makes the situation quietly odd is that the old structure's stones and fittings did not simply disappear; they were absorbed into the fabric and furnishings of its successor.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, compiled in the nineteenth century and later published by O'Flanagan, recorded the church's dimensions as roughly twelve metres long and just over four and a half metres wide, with a pointed-arch doorway in the north wall and a window in the east gable. These details place it firmly in the medieval tradition of simple Irish ecclesiastical architecture. The building was re-roofed in 1840, suggesting it remained in active parish use even then, and a transept was added sometime in the 1890s, as noted by the antiquary T. J. Westropp. Despite that relatively recent investment in the fabric, the whole structure was demolished less than fifty years later.

The objects that migrated into the present church are worth pausing over. Among them is a possible bullaun, a roughly hollowed stone of a type associated with early Christian sites across Ireland, which has been repurposed as a holy water stoup. A separate architectural fragment has been converted into a free-standing stoup. There is also a crucifixion plaque, probably of nineteenth-century date, which is thought to have originated at Teampall Mhuire. Taken together, these pieces amount to a modest but tangible archaeology of a vanished building, preserved almost incidentally in the church that stands in its place.