Religious house, Buttevant, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Religious Houses
Along the southern boundary of a Convent of Mercy graveyard in the south-east corner of Buttevant, a length of old wall sits embedded in a newer one, almost entirely unremarked.
It is eighteen metres long, nearly three metres at its highest point, and at its centre there is a blocked window opening, the upper portion now gone. What remains of the embrasure is lined with cut-limestone blocks, and it may be the last visible trace of what an antiquarian once described as a small trefoil-headed two-light window, a style common to late medieval ecclesiastical architecture in Ireland, where the top of the window opening is divided into three leaf-shaped lobes.
The paper trail for this fragment is long and inconclusive. Writing in 1750, Charles Smith noted the existence of a partial ruin near Buttevant's Franciscan friary and recorded the local tradition that it had been a nunnery, dedicated either to St Owen or to St John the Baptist, depending on who was asked. A century later, in 1852, the antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash visited and identified the window as belonging to that same structure. Scholars Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1988, acknowledged Smith's reference but were unable to find any supporting evidence that a nunnery had ever actually stood at Buttevant. There is a further complication: the wall may alternatively be the remains of a Roman Catholic chapel recorded separately in the local inventory. Whether it was a nunnery, a chapel, or something else entirely, nobody has been able to say with confidence.
What survives, then, is not a monument with a settled identity but a question made of limestone. The blocked window opening, the uncertainty about its dedication, the competing traditions attached to it across three centuries of inquiry, all of it points to a building whose purpose has slipped almost completely out of reach, leaving only this wall, incorporated into a later boundary, quietly holding its place.