Monastery (in ruins), Pollboy, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Churches & Chapels
A medieval church sitting in marshy farmland on the eastern bank of the Grand Canal, just outside Ballinasloe, is not the kind of place that announces itself.
Known locally as 'The Teampoilin', a diminutive of the Irish word for church, it occupies a quietly anomalous spot: the waterway beside it is an eighteenth-century engineering project, while the building itself predates it by several centuries. What survives is a roofless but largely intact stone church, oriented east to west, measuring roughly 16 metres long and 6.6 metres wide, so overgrown with ivy that some of its original features have become difficult to examine from close quarters.
The architectural detail still legible within the ruin is considerable. The original doorway in the south wall has a tall, pointed arch, characteristic of late medieval Irish ecclesiastical building. Further along the same wall there is a single-light window, two aumbries (small wall recesses used to store liturgical vessels), and what may be a sedilia, a set of seats built into the wall for use by officiating clergy during services. The east gable retains a twin-light window with ogee-headed tracery, flanked by two further aumbries. Three pairs of beam slots near the west end of the north and south walls suggest that the church once had a loft at that end, lit, according to local historian P.K. Egan writing in 1960, by small rectangular lights set high in the walls, though no trace of these was visible on survey. The walls themselves rest on a base-batter, a splayed or sloping lower course of large stones that widens the footprint at ground level for stability, a detail that speaks to careful original construction. One section of the north wall has been replaced with modern concrete, which is jarring, but the remaining walls appear to survive close to their original height.
The church's origins are uncertain in an interesting way. Local tradition held it to be a dependent cell of Clontuskert Abbey, an Augustinian house a few kilometres to the south, and there is also a tradition of a togher, an ancient raised trackway through boggy ground, connecting the two sites. Scholars Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, were sceptical of the formal connection with Clontuskert, leaving the precise institutional history of the building unresolved. The scarp that runs from south through west to north around the church likely marks the outer limit of a former enclosure, though no graveyard wall or boundary survives above ground.