Archaeology 360: Clontuskert Augustinian Friary, Co. Galway



Start at the east window from outside and you're looking at tracery that isn't all original - the gable it sits in came down in 1918, and what's there today is a 1970s rebuild using whatever pieces of the old window could be salvaged from the rubble, patched out with new stone where they couldn't. Circle round for the overview from the south-east and then the south-west and you get the shape of the place: an Augustinian priory of St Mary, founded here in the late 12th century on ground that already had a monastic settlement going back to around 800 AD (credited to a St Baedán) - though sources disagree on who founded the priory itself, some crediting the Ó Ceallaigh family, others Turlough O'Connor, King of Connacht. The west doorway is the headline act: four orders of carving finished in 1471, inscribed with the names of Matthew, Bishop of Clonfert, and Patrick O'Naughton, canon of the house, and crowded with St Michael weighing souls, Saints Augustine, Catherine and John the Baptist, a pelican, a mermaid with her mirror, and a scatter of griffins and other invented beasts worked in among the foliage. Wander the cloister's north-east and south-west corners and you're walking what survives of the claustral quadrangle, its arcade carried on slender columns with carved capitals; head into the domestic range beyond it and you'll find the oven, the practical end of monastic life a stone's throw from all that carved theology. Back inside at the west end, look for the sedilia's panels of Christ's life and the piscina with its small carved lion, then turn to the rood screen - a substantial arcaded stone screen pieced back together from fragments dug up in a 1970s excavation, still carrying the name Johannes somewhere in the stonework, though no one's sure now whether he was the mason or the man who paid him. Finish where you started, at the east window, this time from inside looking out - the whole place burned once, in 1404, reputedly after a lightning strike, and stands rebuilt around you regardless.


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