Site of Abbey, Foats, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Religious Houses
On the north-eastern edge of Aughrim village in County Galway, a low ridge holds what amounts to an absence.
A Church of Ireland church and rectory built in the nineteenth century occupy the ground, and to their west the earth is noticeably uneven, a slight disturbance in the surface that is the only physical hint of something older underneath. No walls survive, no carved stonework, no legible outline. What was once significant enough to be labelled on Ordnance Survey maps has been almost entirely swallowed by later building and time.
The layers of possible history here are genuinely complicated. There was an early monastery at Aughrim, attributed by the seventeenth-century scholar John Colgan to a St. Conall, though the precise date of that foundation is unknown. The placename "Abbey" on the first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey maps may refer to that early monastic site, but scholars have suggested it more likely points to a priory of Augustinian canons, a community of clergy following the Rule of St. Augustine, established in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. Whether these were one continuous religious settlement or two distinct foundations at different periods is unresolved. By the time the third edition of the OS six-inch map appeared in 1946, the cartographic notation had shifted from a broken circular outline to a simple cross-symbol, suggesting that even the mapmakers were uncertain what exactly they were marking. A castle once stood 195 metres to the north-west, hinting that this corner of east Galway was, for a period, a place of some consequence.