Chapel (ruin), Shantallow, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Churches & Chapels
At the edge of a garden in Shantallow, Co. Mayo, a stretch of limestone wall does double duty as both ruin and field boundary.
What survives of this chapel is not a dramatic shell open to the sky but something quieter and harder to read: a south wall, fragments of an east wall, a doorway or two blocked up with loose stone and concrete, and a small semi-circular recess in the interior face whose original purpose is no longer certain. The building has been absorbed so thoroughly into the working landscape around it, bounded by a road to the south and a renovated cottage and farm complex to the west, that its ecclesiastical past survives mainly in local memory and on old maps.
By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first six-inch map of the area, the site was already marked as a chapel ruin, and the 1930 edition confirmed its continued decline, labelling it "Chapel (in Ruins)". Both maps show a cluster of buildings at the location, among them several east-west rectangular structures and one L-shaped building. Which of these was the chapel is not immediately obvious from the cartographic evidence alone, but local tradition identifies the surviving L-shaped remains as the one. The south wall, running some thirteen to fourteen metres east-west, retains well-cut mortared limestone blocks on its outer face, though ivy obscures much of the western end. The upper two courses were rebuilt during a Fás scheme, a government-funded employment programme, in the latter half of the twentieth century, accounting for the noticeably rougher stonework near the top. The east wall, standing up to 2.5 metres at its highest, contains a flat-arched doorway whose two jambs differ markedly from each other in construction, suggesting the building was modified or extended at some point. The northern continuation of this wall, rougher in technique and possibly keyed in rather than bonded, may represent a later addition that gave the structure its L-shaped plan. The date of the building remains uncertain, though it is thought to belong to the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. The rectangular buildings that once stood to the east have left no visible trace.