Qualla: Kilcrea Friary

Kilcrea Friary: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Slongy, CC BY-SA 4.0. Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill, twenty-six years old and newly widowed, drank her dead husband's blood from cupped hands beside the road. Then she composed, by tradition extempore, the poem that would become Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire - the lament for Art O Laoghaire - the most celebrated piece of Irish-language verse of the eighteenth century. The man she mourned was buried at Kilcrea Friary, where his roofless stone slab still reads: "Lo Arthur Leary, Generous, Handsome, Brave, slain in His Bloom, lies in this Humble Grave, Died May 4th, 1773, Aged 26 Years." The friary that holds him is older than the Reformation, older than the Tudor conquest. It has been holding the dead of Muskerry for more than five centuries.

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Image: Slongy | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilcrea Friary: Cormac the Strong builds a refuge

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1465, Cormac Laidir MacCarthy - Cormac the Strong, ninth Lord of Muskerry - invited the Observant Franciscans into the valley of the Bride. He built them a friary and, half a mile west, a tower house to protect it. The Observants were the strict branch of the Franciscan order,...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilcrea Friary: Sacked, repaired, sacked again

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. The English army first attacked Kilcrea in 1542 - the year Henry VIII declared himself King of Ireland - and sacked it again in 1584. Each time the friars came back. The MacCarthys kept paying for repairs through the late 1500s while the broader Gaelic order around them was break...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilcrea Friary: Caoineadh Airt

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. Art O Laoghaire was thirty when a Protestant magistrate named Abraham Morris shot him from his horse on the road near Carriganima on 4 May 1773. The official charge was that Art had refused, as a Catholic under the Penal Laws, to sell his fine bay mare to Morris for the legally m...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kilcrea Friary: Walking the ruin

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The Speckled Bird, CC BY-SA 4.0. Approach Kilcrea today and the tower comes into view first - tall, square, narrow, with a single ogee window in each face of the top storey. A west doorway in the gable leads into the chapel. An arcade separates the nave from the south aisle and transept. The chancel still holds ...

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Image: The Speckled Bird | CC BY-SA 4.0