Qualla: Monastery of Mohill-Manchan

Monastery of Mohill-Manchan: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fifiheavey, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 538 AD, according to the Irish annals, a man named Manchan died at a place called Maethail in what is now south Leitrim. He had founded a small Christian church here in the sixth century - one of hundreds of monastic foundations that sprang up across Ireland during what later historians called the Age of Saints. Around it grew a community of monks, a school, a mill, a guesthouse for travellers, a Christian burial ground, monastic cells, a house of tears for grief and lamentation, and a round tower. For more than a thousand years it survived as a Christian institution. Today almost nothing of it remains - the base of a round tower next to the old folks' home in modern Mohill town, a roofless old school-house under thick ivy, and the south and east walls of a family vault in the graveyard that used to be a sanctuary. But the saint's name still names the town. Maethail Manchain - Mohill of Manchan.

Image: Fifiheavey | CC BY-SA 4.0

Monastery of Mohill-Manchan: Manchan and the Túath

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nmclough, CC BY-SA 4.0. Manchan of Mohill is a sixth-century figure about whom almost nothing certain is known. The annals record his death at Maethail in 538 AD. His remains were apparently preserved here as relics, and in 1166 - more than six hundred years after his death - the Annals of the Four Mast...

Image: Nmclough | CC BY-SA 4.0

Monastery of Mohill-Manchan: Becoming a Priory

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1216, in the wave of church reform that followed the Norman invasion, the old Irish monastery was reorganised as a priory of the Canons Regular of Saint Augustine, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The new community followed the Rule of Saint Augustine and the conventional Con...

Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0

Monastery of Mohill-Manchan: The Saxons at Maethail

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Gavigan, CC BY 2.5. From the 1540s onwards, Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries was being enforced across Ireland, and the end of the sixteenth century was, as one source dryly puts it, 'a bad time for priests and papists.' In March 1590 a final military blow fell. The annals record: 'An imm...

Image: Peter Gavigan | CC BY 2.5

Monastery of Mohill-Manchan: What Remains

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nmclough, CC BY-SA 4.0. St Mary's Church of Ireland was built on the priory ruins in the eighteenth century, a Protestant church on the foundations of the Catholic monastery. The Hyde family vault in its graveyard - the Hydes were a prominent local Anglo-Irish family who later produced Douglas Hyde, fou...

Image: Nmclough | CC BY-SA 4.0