Corcomroe Abbey remains in Ireland for Black and White Community

 

Corcomroe Abbey was one of many ancient abbeys I visited during my travels through Ireland, guided by a private tour guide I had hired for the journey. He was a wonderfully friendly, rather formidable-looking fellow—beer belly, full beard and an endless supply of stories. I have to confess that I remember very little of the history he told me. There was simply too much of it, day after day, as we moved from one ancient ruin to another. Perhaps my generous tipping every evening also helped maintain his enthusiasm for keeping me company.

But Corcomroe was different.

Hidden in a quiet valley beneath the limestone hills of the Burren in County Clare, the abbey seemed almost to grow out of the landscape. The Cistercians established their monastery here around the end of the twelfth century, probably around 1194–1200, with monks coming from Inislounaght Abbey in County Tipperary. The precise founder remains uncertain: tradition attributes it either to Donal Mór O’Brien, King of Thomond, or to his son Donough Cairbreach. The monastery was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and became known in Latin as Sancta Maria de Petra Fertili—Saint Mary of the Fertile Rock—a wonderfully paradoxical name for a place surrounded by the seemingly endless grey stone of the Burren.

The church that survives today belongs principally to the early thirteenth century, probably built between about 1210 and 1225. Its limestone walls, ribbed vaulting, narrow lancet windows and beautifully carved capitals speak of a remarkably skilled medieval tradition sometimes called the “School of the West.” Flowers and plants appear in the stonework—lily-of-the-valley, poppy, foxglove and other delicate forms—an extraordinary softness carved into such austere stone.

There is also the tomb of Conor O’Brien, King of Thomond, who died in 1268, his effigy still lying within the ruined church. The O’Brien connection runs deeply through the history of Corcomroe, as does the turbulent history of medieval Clare. The abbey witnessed centuries of changing power, local dynasties and conflict. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its fortunes declined, and the monastic community gradually diminished. The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century eventually brought its religious life to an end, although abbots continued to be associated with the place into the seventeenth century.

There are darker fragments in its history too. Corcomroe stood in a landscape where political struggles between powerful families could be violent, and the surrounding Burren has witnessed battles, raids and centuries of human loss. Yet what remains today is not the violence itself, but the silence that follows it.

And that silence was what I felt most strongly.

I remember walking through the ruins and feeling a peculiar uneasiness. There was something about the place that gave me the creeps. Perhaps it was the isolation, perhaps the centuries of prayer and death contained within those walls, or perhaps simply the way the ancient stones seemed to absorb sound. I have always had a strange sensitivity to places since childhood, and Corcomroe was one of those places where I could almost feel a sadness hanging in the air.

The temperature seemed to drop a few degrees as I moved deeper into the ruins. The Burren itself is an extraordinary landscape—bare limestone pavements, fissures, distant hills and an almost otherworldly stillness—but inside Corcomroe the atmosphere felt different again. The light seemed older. The shadows seemed deeper.

Of course, there is a perfectly ordinary explanation for much of that sensation: ancient stone retains cold, the valley is sheltered, and the ruined church is protected from the warmth of the surrounding landscape. But standing there, surrounded by eight centuries of history, rational explanations seemed strangely inadequate to the experience.

I did not see a ghost. I did not hear a voice.

I simply felt that the place remembered.

Perhaps that is what ancient ruins do. They hold the traces of generations who prayed there, loved there, fought there, died there and were eventually forgotten. The stones remain long after the people have disappeared, quietly carrying their silence into the present.

Corcomroe was not merely another ruined abbey on an Irish itinerary.

For me, it felt like a place where the past had never completely left.

Canon 6D

EF 14mm f2.8

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