Church, Grange, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Grange, Co. Galway

Two ragged walls rising to about four metres, separated by a gap of five metres, are just about all that is left of a building that was already a ruin when nineteenth-century surveyors came to record it.

Set within an oval graveyard defined by a low stone wall, roughly a kilometre west of New Inn in County Galway, the remains sit on the northern end of a ridge running north to south. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a roofed rectangular structure here, around fifteen metres long and five metres wide. By the time John O'Flanagan compiled the OS Letters in 1927, he noted that no part of it remained. What has survived since then is fragmentary to the point of being genuinely puzzling.

The northernmost fragment is a section of the north-west gable, with a robbed-out doorway at its centre, the surrounding stonework stripped away long ago for use elsewhere. A sloping gable line visible on the outer face of this fragment shows that some additional structure once butted up against the building at an eccentric angle, meaning it did not align neatly with the main walls. The southernmost fragment, a T-shaped section of masonry incorporating a side-wall and a later internal dividing wall, points to further phases of alteration or addition. Projecting stones near the southern end of this fragment suggest yet another structure once stood alongside. The overall plan is complex enough that archaeologists have stopped short of identifying the building with certainty: it may be a church, or it may be a domestic building connected to a medieval grange, the word grange referring to an outlying farmstead or estate centre typically associated with monastic or manorial landholding. The townland name preserves this association. Scattered across the graveyard among the fallen masonry are architectural fragments of some quality, including part of a Y-traceried window with multiple cusps and the head of a twin-light cusped ogee window, the kind of decorated stonework that points firmly toward a medieval ecclesiastical origin, even if the walls themselves no longer confirm it. A field system lies to the south-west and west, adding another layer to what was evidently a more substantial medieval landscape than the two surviving wall fragments would lead you to expect.

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