Religious house - Franciscan Third Order Regular, Friarstown, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Religious Houses
A field in County Limerick holds what remains of a religious house, and you could easily walk past it without realising what you were looking at.
The outline of a rectangular structure, roughly thirteen metres east to west and just under six metres north to south, sits in gently undulating pasture, its walls reduced to low, sod-covered ridges of limestone rubble. The interior has been colonised by bracken and briars, and along the western side the wall has collapsed inward and been gradually swallowed by grass, so that the ground inside actually sits higher than the ground outside. A low earthen mound runs along the southern and western flanks, and a gap near the centre of the southern side may once have served as an entrance.
The site is identified in Gwynn and Hadcock's authoritative 1970 survey of medieval religious houses in Ireland as the remains of a friary belonging to the Franciscan Third Order Regular. The Third Order Regular was a branch of the Franciscan movement whose members lived in community under a rule, somewhere between the fully professed friars of the main order and the lay associates of the broader Third Order. Houses of this kind were often smaller and more modest than the great Franciscan friaries of the medieval Irish towns, and the dimensions here, along with the rough coursed-and-mortared limestone construction, are consistent with that quieter tradition. The walls are best preserved at the western end of the southern side, where the masonry still stands to an external height of around one and a half metres.
The site lies in open pasture, so access depends on the usual courtesies of the Irish countryside, including identifying the landowner and seeking permission before crossing any field boundaries. The monument is most legible in late autumn or winter, when bracken dies back and the low earthen enclosure and wall lines cast better shadows in raking light. What you are looking for is subtle: a slightly raised, irregular rectangle in the grass, the hint of mortared stone beneath the sod, and the curious inversion of levels at the western end where centuries of collapse have quietly rearranged the ground.