Qualla: Clare Island Abbey

Clare Island Abbey: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. On the ceiling of a small thirteenth-century church on Clare Island, dragons curl through painted vines. There are stags, a cockerel, a harper bent over his strings, mounted horsemen, birds, trees - a medieval bestiary in colours muted by seven centuries of damp Atlantic air. The paintings should not be here. Cistercian houses, by the order's reformist principles, deliberately avoided this kind of ornamental display. But Clare Island Abbey - officially Saint Brigid's Abbey, founded sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century - has its dragons anyway, surviving on a remote Mayo island when more accessible Cistercian foundations had theirs whitewashed long ago.

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clare Island Abbey: A Cell of Knockmoy

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Saint Brigid's was founded as a small Cistercian house in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and in 1224 became a cell of Knockmoy Abbey, the larger Cistercian foundation near Tuam in County Galway. The architecture is modest - a small nave, a chancel, the usual liturgical fittin...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clare Island Abbey: The Painted Ceiling

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. What sets Clare Island Abbey apart from any number of similar small abbeys around Ireland is the survival of its medieval wall and ceiling paintings - one of the most important collections of late medieval secular and mythological imagery in the country. The figures include drago...

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Image: Andreas F. Borchert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Clare Island Abbey: The O'Malley Tomb

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Horn, CC BY-SA 2.0. The abbey contains numerous tombs of the local ruling family, the O Maille - O'Malley. The most prominent is a canopied tomb on the north wall, and tradition holds that this is the burial place of Grainne Ni Mhaille, Grace O'Malley, the famous pirate queen who died around 1603. T...

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Image: Graham Horn | CC BY-SA 2.0

Clare Island Abbey: Dissolution and Refuge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridiculopathy, CC0. The abbey was probably dissolved in the late sixteenth century, swept up in the long process by which the English crown took apart Irish monastic institutions. But Clare Island was remote and difficult to reach, and the buildings did not become a quarry the way some mainland abbe...

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Image: Ridiculopathy | CC0