Qualla: Aghadoe Cathedral

Aghadoe Cathedral: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bkwillwm, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay walked the grounds around Aghadoe Cathedral in the summer of 1849, he counted what the local people already knew. Over the previous three years, approximately 2,000 famine victims from the local workhouse had been buried within the one-acre church grounds. The cathedral itself had been a ruin for centuries by then - a roofless shell of stone overlooking the Lakes of Killarney - but the ground around it was still being used. The dead from the workhouse were laid in a corner of the churchyard, with no individual markers. Two thousand people. Within an acre, within three years, within a single corner. Their names, mostly, did not survive them.

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Image: Bkwillwm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aghadoe Cathedral: Place With Two Yews

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joanne po, CC BY-SA 4.0. Aghadoe means 'place with two yews' in Irish - Achadh Deo - and the site may have been sacred before any of the surviving stone was laid. Pagan religious activity is likely to have preceded the Christian foundation. By the seventh century, the missionary tradition associates St. ...

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Image: Joanne po | CC BY-SA 4.0

Aghadoe Cathedral: The Great Church of 1158

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bkwillwm, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the middle of the twelfth century, Amhlaoibh Mor O Donoghue - leader of the O Donoghue clan and the new rulers of the kingdom of Eoganacht Locha Lein - commissioned a new church on the Aghadoe site. Built in the Romanesque style and dedicated to the Holy Trinity, it incorporat...

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Image: Bkwillwm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aghadoe Cathedral: Crosiers, Crosses, and a Salmon

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bkwillwm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Aghadoe Crosier, made of walrus ivory carved in the Urnes style, is one of the great surviving artefacts of medieval Ireland. A second crosier, possibly associated with Aghadoe, was pulled from the Lakes of Killarney in 1867 by a fisherman who at first thought it was a salmon...

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Image: Bkwillwm | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aghadoe Cathedral: The Workhouse Dead

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bkwillwm, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Great Irish Famine reached Killarney like every other corner of Ireland. From 1846 to 1849, the local workhouse held the people who had no other shelter - and the workhouse, by design, killed as many as it sheltered. Disease, malnutrition, exhaustion. When workhouse inmates d...

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Image: Bkwillwm | CC BY-SA 3.0