Church, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
On the small island of Inis Gé Thuaidh off the coast of Mayo, a graveyard holds a peculiar absence at its north-western corner.
Where a church once stood, there is now nothing at all, not a foundation course, not a dressed stone, not a scatter of rubble. The only physical clue that anything was ever there is a right-angled indentation in the graveyard wall, a four-metre notch running both east to west and north to south, which appears to mark the footprint of the vanished building.
The church appears clearly on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1838, labelled simply as "Church" and shown as a rectangular structure on an east-west axis, the standard orientation for a Christian place of worship. By the 1921 edition of the same map, the annotation had changed to "Church (in Ruins)". At some point between those two surveys, or in the century since, the structure disappeared entirely. No description of its dimensions, its construction, or its dedication survives, which is itself unusual. Most ruined churches, even modest ones, leave at least some trace in the historical record or in the ground. This one left only a kink in a wall.