Qualla: Creevelea Abbey

Creevelea Abbey: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Avirwin, CC BY-SA 4.0. It is a quiet ruin beside a river in County Leitrim, and the cloister carving still shows Saint Francis preaching to the birds. But Creevelea Abbey has a stranger distinction than its peaceful setting suggests: it was the last Franciscan friary built in Ireland before Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries swept through the country. Founded in 1508 by Eoghan O'Rourke, Lord of West Breifne, and his wife Margaret O'Brian, the friary had perhaps thirty years of regular monastic life before it became, instead, a problem.

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Image: Avirwin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Creevelea Abbey: The Last Foundation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eoghan O'Rourke and Margaret O'Brian, daughter of a King of Thomond, founded Creevelea as a daughter house of Donegal Abbey. The Franciscans arrived, built their church with nave, chancel, transept and choir, raised a bell tower, and laid out the cloister where the figure of Fran...

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

Creevelea Abbey: The Armada and the Stables

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1590, an English soldier named Richard Bingham, Governor of Connacht, rode into Creevelea and stabled his horses inside the friary church. He was hunting Brian O'Rourke, the local Gaelic chieftain who had sheltered survivors of the Spanish Armada the previous year. Bingham's g...

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

Creevelea Abbey: Hedge School for a Classicist

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User: (WT-shared) The.Q at wts wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 2.5. What happened next is one of the surprising chapters of eighteenth-century Irish intellectual history. The surviving Franciscans, scattered across the surrounding country, ran an underground hedge school for local Catholic children, who were barred from formal education by the Pe...

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Image: User: (WT-shared) The.Q at wts wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 2.5

Creevelea Abbey: Buried Kings

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two figures from West Breifne lie buried in the ruins. Sir Tadhg O'Rourke, who died in 1605, was the last man to hold the title King of West Breifne, a Gaelic kingship that had been in the family for centuries. Beside him lies Thaddeus Francis O'Rourke, who died in 1735, a Franci...

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

Creevelea Abbey: What the Stones Remember

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Today Creevelea is a national monument, preserved as a ruin and still in use as a graveyard. The bell tower was converted to living quarters in the 17th century, and at some point the church was covered with a thatched roof to keep the worst of the Leitrim weather off the familie...

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