Church, Garbally Demesne, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
Beneath the footpaths and front gardens of a mid-twentieth-century housing estate in Ballinasloe, the ground holds the remains of a medieval ecclesiastical site that most residents walking above it would have no reason to suspect is there.
There is no marker, no ruin, no visible outline in the grass. The site survives entirely underground, and even that is a loose term for what was largely disturbed and scattered during building work decades ago.
The place has a long and layered past. According to historian P.K. Egan, writing in 1960, there is evidence of a church at Dunlo, within Kilcloony parish, as far back as the tenth century. By the seventeenth century the site was known locally as the high church yard, a name that also carried the function of an infants' burial ground, the kind of unconsecrated or semi-consecrated space, often called a cillín, where unbaptised children were traditionally interred in Ireland. Its location was recorded on Petty's Atlas, the series of county maps produced by Sir William Petty following his Down Survey of Ireland in the 1650s, which makes it one of the earlier cartographically documented ecclesiastical sites in the region. When construction of St Joseph's Terrace began in 1955, the ground gave up what it had been quietly holding: large quantities of adult human remains, along with a bronze harp-peg and pin, and a bone spindle whorl. The harp-peg is a small but striking detail, a fragment of a stringed instrument that would have been in use during the early medieval period, when the church itself may have been active. The spindle whorl, a small weighted disc used in hand-spinning thread, speaks to the domestic life that existed alongside the religious one. Both objects ended up in the topographical files of the National Museum of Ireland.
Today the site sits within an ordinary residential street to the west of Portiuncula University Hospital. Nothing marks the spot, and there is nothing for a visitor to see on the surface. Its interest lies entirely in the fact of its burial, both literal and administrative, beneath the unremarkable fabric of a town that, like many Irish towns, was built directly on top of a much older one.