Religious house - Dominican friars

The National Monuments Service's description

A Dominican friary dedicated to the Holy Cross was founded here in 1385 by Rufus Mac Dermot Roe (Gwynn and Hadcock 1970, 223) or Tiege Roe Mac Dermot of Airteach on what was regarded by J. O'Donovan in 1837 as a church site founded by St Patrick (O'Flanagan 1931, vol. 1, 77-9). It was listed as Glynsennul in the ecclesiastical taxation of Elphin in 1306 (Cal. doc. Ire., vol. 5, 224). After the Supression in 1577 it was held by Edward White in 1596 when it was burnt by Irish rebels (O'Conor, 2007, 197). A William Taffe or Davis then leased its 72 acres, which remained in the Davis family down to the 1880s when the land was sold to Baron de Freyne, a scion of the French family of Frenchpark (Jennings 2019). The friary is situated on a slight rise in a level landscape within a D-shaped graveyard (RO015-030002-) (dims 55m N-S c. 50m E-W) which has been extended with a new rectangular graveyard (dims 88m N-S; 43m E-W) attached to the E. There are traces of an ecclesiastical enclosure (RO015-030005-) visible as a scarp or bank (Wth c. 4m; H 0.2-0.4m) outside the graveyard NW-E (diam. c. 120m).
The church consisted of a nave which can no longer be traced, and chancel (int. dims 13.2m E-W; 6.1m N-S), of which only the base of the E wall (int. H 1m; ext. H 3m) and adjacent parts of the N wall and the S wall with a piscina remain. The E window was an elaborate three-light decorated feature, and there was a three-light window placed high on the S wall of the chancel (Grose 1791, vol. 2, 52-3; Pls 89, 90), but these no longer survive. The N transept (int. dims 10.75 N-S; 6.35m E-W) is now reduced to the base of the walls (int. H 0.5-2m), with a piscina at the N end of the E wall. A tower (ext. dims 4.2m E-W; c. 4.5m N-S) of at least three floors survives E of the transept. Its ground floor has a pointed E-W vault with wicker centering and two openings for bell-pulls, and there are three external string-courses on the upper levels. There are traces of an E-W building 14.4m S of the tower, and the intervening area may have been a cloister.

A mausoleum of the French family (RO015-030006-) is immediately W of the N transept and impinges on the site of the nave. It is a square roofless structure (ext. dims 4.9m E-W; 4.55m N-S; H 2.5m) with a doorway (Wth 1.1m) at the W end of the S wall, and at one time had gables at E and W, the latter with a narrow light (Grose 1791, vol. 2, Pl. 89). Attached to the inside of the E wall is a memorial plaque (RO015-030004-) which has a crest of the French family and an inscription commemorating Patrick French Fitz-Stephen of Galway and Dungar (RO015-023----) and the date 1667 (Weld 1832, 197, Timoney 1980, 8). The high cross (RO015-029----) is c. 350m to the SW, and archaeological testing (97E0271) c. 140m SW of the church failed to produce any related material (Walsh 1997a). (McDermott 2009)

This is a National Monument in the care of Roscommon County Council.

See attached images of details from the tower

Compiled by: Michael Moore

Date of upload: 20 April 2018

References

Timoney, M.A. 1980 Two stone crucifixion plaques from east Connaught. In H. Murtagh (ed.), Irish Midland Studies: essays in commemoration of N.W. English, 142-6. Old Athlone Society.

Walsh, G. 1997a Cloonshanville. Adjacent to abbey. In I. Bennett (ed.), Excavations 1996: summary accounts of archaeological excavations in Ireland, 94, No. 329. Bray. Wordwell.

Weld, I. 1832 Statistical survey of the county Roscommon. Dublin, Royal Dublin Society

McDermott, Y. 2009 The priory of the Holy Cross, Cloonshanville: a fourteenth century Dominican foundation. Journal of the County Roscommon Historical and Archaeological Society 11, 22-5.

O'Flanagan, Rev. M. (Compiler) 1931 Letters containing information relative to the antiquities of the county of Roscommon collected during the progress of the
Ordnance Survey in 1837. Bray.

Grose, F. 1791 The antiquities of Ireland, 2 vols. London. S. Hooper.

Gwynn, A. and Hadcock, R.N. 1970 (Reprint 1988) Medieval religious houses of Ireland. Dublin. Irish Academic Press.

Jennings, F. 2019 If these stones could speak…. Journal of the Roscommon Historical and Archaeological Society, vol. 14, 168-72.

O'Conor, K. 2007 English settlement and change in Roscommon during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. in Horning, A., Ó Baoill, R., Donnelly, C., Logue, P. (eds) The Post Medieval Archaeology of Ireland 1550-1850, 189-203.