Qualla: Ross Errilly Friary https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:12 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Ross Errilly Friary https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary Ross Errilly Friary: Introduction https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit The original uploader was Dppowell at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5. There is a stone tank inside the kitchen wall at Ross Errilly, fed once by the nearby Black River, where the friars kept their fish alive until needed. Eat fish on Fridays, the rule said; eat fish on fast days. So the kitchen had its own aquarium. Five hundred years later the tank is still there, dry now, with the kitchen open to the sky and the bake-oven beside it crumbling at its mouth. A mile from Headford in County Galway, Ross Errilly is among the best-preserved medieval Franciscan friaries in Ireland - and among the longest-haunted, with a community that was expelled seven separate times and somehow kept coming back.

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Image: The original uploader was Dppowell at English Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 2.5

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Ross Errilly Friary: When It Was Founded https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Four Masters and the Franciscan historian Luke Wadding gave the founding date as 1351, and that is the figure carved into many older sources. Modern historians, looking at the architecture, doubt them. The buildings as they stand are 15th-century work, probably around 1460. T...

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

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-when-it-was-founded.mp3 0:06 2 full Ross Errilly Friary: Seven Expulsions https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1538, two years after Henry VIII broke with Rome, English authorities imprisoned two hundred Franciscan friars in Ireland and killed or exiled an unknown number more. At Ross Errilly, the persecutions came in waves. Under Elizabeth I the friary was confiscated and given to Ric...

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

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-seven-expulsions.mp3 0:06 3 full Ross Errilly Friary: Cromwell's Soldiers and the Lost Bell https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 10 August 1656, Cromwellian forces reached the friary. The 140 friars then in residence had fled hours earlier, but the soldiers ransacked the grounds, smashed crosses, and defiled the tombs in search of loot. The local tradition holds that as the friars left, they took the be...

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

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-cromwells-soldiers-and-the-lost-bell.mp3 0:06 4 full Ross Errilly Friary: Friars Island https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. Driven from the friary itself, the small remnant community built cabins of wood and stone on a tiny island in the Black River, a mile downstream. Friars Island, the locals called it. It no longer exists - the river took it. For 36 years, the friars continued to walk back along th...

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

]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-friars-island.mp3 0:06 5 full Ross Errilly Friary: Bones in the Cloister https://qualla.com/ross-errilly-friary/ Photo credit Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the friars went, the ruin became a public burial ground, as so many abandoned Christian sites in Ireland did. By 1835 an English tourist named John Barrow described the abbey as a remarkably fine old ruin in a disgracefully neglected state, with moss-grown skulls and human ...

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]]> Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/9/8/ross-errilly-friary-wp/gc98-ross-errilly-friary-bones-in-the-cloister.mp3 0:06 6 full