Church, Liskeevy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
Between the River Clare and the old railway line east of Liskeevy, a single wall stands in a field and declines to explain itself.
It is a section of the north wall of a former church, roughly 17.5 metres long, 80 centimetres thick, and just under three metres high, and it offers nothing in the way of windows, doorways, carved stonework, or inscriptions. No architectural features are visible. The building it once belonged to has otherwise entirely disappeared.
The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, records the structure as a roofed rectangular building, approximately twelve metres by five metres, oriented east to west in the conventional manner of Christian ecclesiastical buildings. By the time O'Flanagan noted it in 1927, the ruin was already reduced to what remains today. The church sits on a low hillock amid undulating grassland close to the western bank of the River Clare, a quietly anomalous presence in an ordinary agricultural landscape. The eastern boundary of the site runs close to a railway line, which introduces a particular kind of incongruity: a medieval or early modern religious site hemmed in on one side by modern infrastructure and on the other by a river.