What is recorded here

An Mainistir, a small abbey east of the old graveyard at Bweeounagh in Cashel, County Galway, is remembered only through local tradition and vanished foundations. The site belongs to the lost ecclesiastical landscape of North Galway, where worship, burial and daily life once gathered around a church now reduced to memory. Its absence makes the place stranger, not lesser, because the field still holds the shape of what people believed worth building.

In a somewhat convoluted passage, the OS Letters (O'Flanagan 1927, vol. 1, 80) record a local tradition that 'there was a monastery to the east of this old grave yard of Bweeounagh [GA006-030----] ... traces of the foundations of a small abbey called An Mainistir, are pointed out a short distance to the east of the old church' (ibid.). No visible surface traces were noted. The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II - North Galway'. Compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

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