Qualla: Adare Friary

Adare Friary: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. Look closely at the inner spandrels of the east arcade in the small cloister and you can still find the carved arms of the FitzGeralds, the family who paid for the friary in 1316. Seven hundred years and three religious reformations later, the building is still in use - though not by the Augustinians who first walked its ambulatories, and not as a friary at all. The medieval Black Abbey of Adare became, after the Tudor suppression, a Church of Ireland parish church called St Nicholas, and the friars' old refectory became a national school. Children walk into class through corridors where wooden choir stalls once stood. The Mouseman of Yorkshire carved a lectern in here in the twentieth century, and his signature - a tiny mouse - hides somewhere on the wood, waiting to be found.

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Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adare Friary: The Geraldine Foundation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0. John FitzThomas FitzGerald, 1st Earl of Kildare, founded the friary in 1316. The Augustinian Order of Hermits, recently arrived in Ireland from England via Dublin, had built a reputation for pastoral work and serious scholarship; an Augustinian house in a busy market town like Ad...

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Image: Chris Light | CC BY-SA 4.0

Adare Friary: The Black Abbey

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NateBergin, CC BY 4.0. The Augustinians wore black habits, and from this came the Adare friary's first nickname: the Black Abbey. The architecture they left behind is unusually well preserved for a building of its age. The fifteenth-century cloister is small, square, and intimate, with narrow buttress-...

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Image: NateBergin | CC BY 4.0

Adare Friary: Suppression and Survival

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Costa, CC BY 2.0. The Tudor dissolution of the monasteries arrived in Ireland in waves. The Augustinians of Adare held on into the late sixteenth century, but by 1633 they had given up and moved to Limerick city, where Catholic religious life was still possible in the recesses of urban anonymity. ...

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Image: Michael Costa | CC BY 2.0

Adare Friary: A School in the Refectory

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1814 the Earl of Dunraven founded a school in the old refectory of the friary - the long stone hall where Augustinian friars had eaten in silence five hundred years earlier. It became a national school in 1862. For nearly two centuries the children of Adare learned to read and...

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Image: David Shankbone | CC BY-SA 3.0

Adare Friary: Finding the Mouse

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Glenn Wallace GRW144, CC BY-SA 3.0. Among the modern furniture of St Nicholas's church are two pieces by Robert Thompson, the great Yorkshire furniture maker known to admirers as the Mouseman. Thompson signed every piece he made by carving a tiny mouse somewhere on the wood - on a chair leg, under a tabletop, on th...

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Image: Glenn Wallace GRW144 | CC BY-SA 3.0