Church in ruins, Cloghanower, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church in ruins, Cloghanower, Co. Galway

What remains of Kill-Eidhne church in Cloghanower is, in a quite literal sense, less than it was even a few decades ago.

In early 1990 a storm brought down the southeast gable, taking with it most of the evidence for the building's original form. What stands today amounts to half a gable end and short runs of two side walls, all draped in ivy and barely clearing foundation level. A single small rectangular window survives in the southwest wall, and part of the embrasure of a pointed arch window, once centrally placed in the now-fallen gable, can still be made out. A church reduced to two windows is, in its way, a precise kind of ruin.

The building sits on a low rise at the southern end of a small cluster of houses called Cloneen, enclosed within a roughly triangular graveyard. Its plan is rectangular, oriented northwest to southeast, and measures just over eight metres in length by five and a half metres wide. It is probably medieval in date, though a note recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters of the 1830s, later published by O'Flanagan in 1927, observed that Kill-Eidhne was "certainly not more than 4 centuries old" and that it most likely occupied the site of an earlier church altogether. The name itself, Kill-Eidhne, follows the common Irish place-name pattern of "cill", meaning church or monastic cell, suggesting an ecclesiastical presence here that may stretch back considerably further than the standing walls imply. An early edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map shows a separate building labelled as a Roman Catholic chapel along the northern boundary of the graveyard, but nothing of that structure remains above ground today, not even a visible trace at the surface.

The site sits within a small landscape of related features. A holy well lies roughly 200 metres to the north, and a castle stands about 280 metres to the northwest, giving the area a layered quality that goes well beyond the ruined walls themselves.

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