Qualla: Lisgoole Abbey

Lisgoole Abbey: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1631, in a building on the southern bank of Upper Lough Erne, a Franciscan scholar named Micheal O Cleirigh sat down with four other Irish historians and began work on a book that would attempt to compress the entire mythological prehistory of Ireland into one continuous narrative. The result was the Lebor Gabala Erenn, the Book of Invasions, a Gaelic-language genealogy of who had landed on the island, in what order, with what gods. The site where they worked, Lisgoole Abbey, was already six centuries old. It would survive the Reformation, the suppression of the monasteries, and the long collapse that followed, transforming itself into an orphanage, a wartime billet for American medics, and finally a Georgian country house with a battlemented tower at one end. The abbey is gone. The story it sheltered is not.

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Lisgoole Abbey: From St Aid to the Augustinians

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Lisgoole site began as an old Irish monastery dedicated to St Aid, almost certainly a wooden enclosure on the lakeshore in the early medieval centuries. In either 1106 or 1145, depending on which source you trust, it was reconstituted under the Canons Regular of St Augustine ...

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Lisgoole Abbey: Burned, Rebuilt, Forgotten

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1360 the abbey was burned, along with the monasteries at Devenish, Roscommon, Sligo, Fenagh, and Drumlias, in one of the periodic conflagrations that swept Irish ecclesiastical sites in the late medieval period. Lisgoole was soon restored. Records during the reign of Richard I...

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Lisgoole Abbey: Compiling the Book of Invasions

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Micheal O Cleirigh, born around 1590 near Donegal town and trained as a Franciscan in Louvain, returned to Ireland in 1626 with a specific commission: to collect and copy the surviving manuscripts of Gaelic Ireland before they vanished. For seven years he travelled from monastery...

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Lisgoole Abbey: Tyburn, an Earl, and a Strong Box

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1644 Connor Maguire, Lord Maguire of Enniskillen, was hanged at Tyburn in London for his role in the 1641 Irish Rebellion. His last will and testament was kept in a strong box in the custody of the Franciscans at Lisgoole, and among its bequests was twenty pounds to the abbey ...

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Lisgoole Abbey: Orphanage, Army Base, Country House

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The building that stands today is a large Georgian house with a battlemented tower attached at one end, set in substantial grounds along the southern shore of the upper lough. In the nineteenth century the building was used as an orphanage, the kind of institution that scattered ...

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