Church in ruins, Ballyglass, Co. Galway

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Churches & Chapels

Church in ruins, Ballyglass, Co. Galway

Along a Connacht roadside, set within farmland that has long since absorbed it, a late medieval church has been reduced to little more than a geometry lesson in old stone.

The rectangular outline, oriented east to west as was customary for Christian worship, measures roughly nineteen metres long and seven metres wide, but almost nothing of that structure still stands. The northern half of the west gable survives to full height, along with a short run of the adjoining north wall, and that is more or less where the visible architecture ends. The foundation lines of the north, east, and south walls can still be traced across the ground, giving the place a ghostly footprint, but no windows, doorways, or carved details remain to tell you much about who built it or when.

When Ordnance Survey workers passed through the area in the nineteenth century and wrote up their observations, later compiled and published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1927, they noted that the west gable and a small section of the south wall were still standing at that point, including what they described, with admirable frankness, as an ugly window of no interest. That window is now gone entirely, which gives the earlier description an oddly elegiac quality. The church is thought to be of late medieval date, though the loss of all architectural features makes any precise dating difficult. It sits within the eastern half of a large subrectangular graveyard, and the interior of the ruined shell is still used for burials, the ground inside littered with graves that have quietly claimed the space the congregation once occupied.

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