Qualla: Mount Melleray Abbey

Mount Melleray Abbey: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Colin Park, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1830 the Bourbon king of France fell in a three-day revolution, and within months a French abbot was sending Cistercian monks across the sea to Ireland. The Cistercians at Melleray in Brittany had only just rebuilt themselves after the long persecutions of the French Revolution. Seventy of their two hundred members were Irish. Now another revolution was driving them out again. The abbot sent Waterford-born Vincent Ryan home with a mission: found a daughter house in Ireland. On 30 May 1832, on a bleak slope at Scrahan near Cappoquin, Ryan and his companions broke ground. They called the new place Mount Melleray, for the motherhouse they had been expelled from. The local people - many starving in the years before the Great Famine - came to help reclaim the soil. The Cistercians had returned to Ireland for the first time since the Reformation, and they would stay almost two hundred years.

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Image: Colin Park | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Melleray Abbey: Building on bare mountain

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chaus70, CC BY-SA 4.0. The site was unpromising: a north-facing slope in the foothills of the Knockmealdown Mountains, treeless and stony, well outside the prosperous valleys. The brethren broke the soil themselves with help from the parish of Modeligo. On the feast of Saint Bernard in 1833 the foundat...

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Image: Chaus70 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Melleray Abbey: Stirabout for the starving

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexander Redfern, CC BY-SA 4.0. In July 1849, with the Great Famine receding but its ruin still everywhere, the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle paid a visit. He was on his way back from Dromana House, a few miles down the valley. He noted, with his usual sour eye, what he found at the gates of Mount Melleray: ...

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Image: Alexander Redfern | CC BY-SA 4.0

Mount Melleray Abbey: Stones from a burned castle

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1922 the IRA burned Mitchelstown Castle - the biggest neo-Gothic house in Ireland - twenty-eight miles west across the Knockmealdowns. Three years later, with the Civil War over, the Kingstons' heirs decided to dismantle what was left of the ruin and sell the stones. Mount Mel...

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Image: Jonathan Thacker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Melleray Abbey: A school, a scout camp, a poem

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathan Thacker, CC BY-SA 2.0. From its earliest days Mount Melleray ran a school for clerical and lay students alike, set in a small house outside the enclosure. Past pupils included James O'Gorman, who would become second prior of New Melleray; W. H. Grattan Flood, the musicologist; and a remarkable line of ...

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Image: Jonathan Thacker | CC BY-SA 2.0

Mount Melleray Abbey: A quiet ending

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hywel Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. Eamon Fitzgerald, who served as abbot of Mount Melleray from 1989 to 2008, became the abbot general of the worldwide Cistercian order from 2008 to 2022 - the first Irishman to hold the office. But the slow decline was unmistakable. Vocations had dried up. The community was ageing...

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Image: Hywel Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0