Ross Errilly Friary number 2, Headford, Co. Galway, Ireland
From 'Monastic Ireland': One of the most impressive surviving Franciscan friaries in Ireland, Ross Errilly is located 2km North West of the Galway village of Headford. It was founded at some point between the mid-fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries. It’s two large chapels or ‘transepts’ more than double the space of the nave, while the two-storey domestic buildings are set around both a cloister and an outer court. The domestic buildings are particularly well-preserved due to the continued use of the friary into the eighteenth century. This gives visitors a great sense of the unfolding of the friars’ everyday life around the cloister and outer court: in the west range of the outer court is the kitchen, where there is a large fireplace with an oven, beside a deep circular stone pit, a fish tank; the refectory is located in the eastern range of the outer court, with the lector’s desk at the northwest corner of the room; various staircases led to the friars’ dormitories in the upper floors. In the church, the multiple chapels and secondary altars in the nave and its ‘double transept’, the gallery used as a preaching platform, the tomb niches, are all features associated with the devotions and religious practice of the laity, suggesting that, despite its seemingly remote foundation in a very rural landscape, the friary and the friars served the pastoral and spiritual needs of a local population important enough to fund the construction and maintenance of these structures.
Ross Errilly Friary number 2, Headford, Co. Galway, Ireland
From 'Monastic Ireland': One of the most impressive surviving Franciscan friaries in Ireland, Ross Errilly is located 2km North West of the Galway village of Headford. It was founded at some point between the mid-fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries. It’s two large chapels or ‘transepts’ more than double the space of the nave, while the two-storey domestic buildings are set around both a cloister and an outer court. The domestic buildings are particularly well-preserved due to the continued use of the friary into the eighteenth century. This gives visitors a great sense of the unfolding of the friars’ everyday life around the cloister and outer court: in the west range of the outer court is the kitchen, where there is a large fireplace with an oven, beside a deep circular stone pit, a fish tank; the refectory is located in the eastern range of the outer court, with the lector’s desk at the northwest corner of the room; various staircases led to the friars’ dormitories in the upper floors. In the church, the multiple chapels and secondary altars in the nave and its ‘double transept’, the gallery used as a preaching platform, the tomb niches, are all features associated with the devotions and religious practice of the laity, suggesting that, despite its seemingly remote foundation in a very rural landscape, the friary and the friars served the pastoral and spiritual needs of a local population important enough to fund the construction and maintenance of these structures.