Church, Carrownaseer, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Carrownaseer, Co. Galway

In a low-lying field south of the Derrymore River in County Galway, there is very little left to see of a medieval church, and yet the ground around it is quietly crowded with objects.

The foundations have long since disappeared under grass, leaving only a slight rectangular swell in the earth, but clustered nearby are a cross-slab, a tau cross, and a bullaun stone, the last of these marked on old Ordnance Survey maps under the name 'St. Patrick's Stone'. The concentration of early Christian material in one modest, unassuming spot is what makes Carrownaseer worth attention.

The church itself was small, measuring roughly 10.6 metres in length and 7.2 metres in width, and was oriented east to west in the conventional manner. A rectangular enclosure surrounds it, defined on three sides by a drystone wall, though the southern side of that boundary has been removed at some point. The western entrance, about 1.8 metres wide, still reads clearly in the landscape. Immediately south of the church foundations lies a cross-slab, a flat stone carved with a cross and typical of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. The bullaun stone to the north-northeast is a boulder with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface; such stones are found widely across Ireland and are often associated with early saints and healing traditions. The tau cross, shaped like the Greek letter T rather than the more familiar Latin cross, is a rarer form. The site's connection to St Patrick is traditional rather than documented, noted as far back as 1914 by Neary, though Patrician associations are common across the west of Ireland and should be understood as reflecting local devotional memory rather than verified biography.

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