We say goodbye to Lough Boora – leave two beach stones from home, for sons emigrated

                We travel northwards and land at the recently restoration Abbey at Boyle.

This glass structure replicates an Elizabethan lean-to addition, when the abbey was  converted to a barracks in 1592 Prior to that, Cistercians founded the abbey around 1161.  Respecting Celtic monastic buildings they joined their abbey to this now stump of a round tower

Before restoration,  old Lime mortar was sent off for analysis and matched as closely as possible by French Lime.

Old and new Lime on a vaulted ceiling

It is thought the church took about sixty years to complete with the final section being finished in around 1226

Little remains of the cloister due to besigement by Cromwellians in 1648

But the scale and majesty of this place can’t fail to impress – indeed it is one of the most formidable of the Cistercian Abbeys in Ireland

The Abbey of Boyle

The design – influenced by styles from Burgundy from whence the Cistercians came to Ireland –  is in the form of a Latin cross, about forty meters long and twenty meters wide, oriented east-west, with the choir and altar at the east end

Of special interest are the decorated corbels and capitals – believed to be the work of local masons.

Monks

Wild animals eat a human head

Among the most mysterious and intriguing is the so-called ‘green man’ – positioned opposite to the “Door of the Dead” – where after mass they carried out the bodies of monks who had died.  It looks like a strange mask.

‘Green Man’

Diagonally opposing the ‘death door’ and quite difficult to spot, perched high upon her cylindrical pillar

                                 That most special kind of Irish woman – ‘Sheela na gig’

Síle na gcíoch