Templekilmona Church (in ruins), Castleturvin, Co. Galway
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Churches & Chapels
What survives of Templekilmona Church near Castleturvin in County Galway is, by any measure, very little.
The east gable has collapsed entirely, leaving only a foundation line in the ground. Sections of both side-walls have fallen. What masonry does remain standing rises to between two and two and a half metres in places, enough to suggest the shape of a small rectangular building measuring roughly thirteen metres east to west and just over four metres north to south, set within a wider ecclesiastical enclosure. There are no surviving architectural features, no windows, no doorways, nothing carved or dressed, only raw walling.
The most telling detail about this ruin is not its state of decay but a discrepancy in how it was built. The western end of the church is constructed from large, irregular boulders of a kind sometimes described as semi-cyclopean, a term referring to the use of massive, barely shaped stones reminiscent of ancient Greek construction traditions. The eastern end, by contrast, is made up of considerably smaller boulders. This difference in material and technique suggests the building was not conceived and raised as a single project. The working interpretation, recorded by Cody in 1989, is that an original, smaller church was later extended eastward, with builders working in a noticeably different style. A low plinth, a projecting base course that helps a wall shed water and resist ground damp, is still faintly traceable along the west gable and the north side-wall. The church sits in the southern half of its enclosure, with a graveyard lying immediately to the south.