Clare Island Survey — History arid Archaeology. 2 67 



an after-thought. The building is 36 feet 6 inches long to the north, 37 feet to 

 the south, and 1 7 feet 9 inches wide ; the walls are 3 feet thick. A defaced 

 door leads into the western compartment, evidently separated for a priest's 

 house and sacristy, a room 17 feet 9 inches square; the west end is down, and 

 the two narrow side windows are defaced. Kows of plain corbels, along the 

 western half of each side, suggest an upper floor, or perhaps a gallery, when 

 it was included in the church. The south doorway of the church had a rather 

 flat relieving arch covered with shell mortar ; the door turned in stone sockets, 

 of a type common about 1480. The doorway lies 3 feet 6 inches from the west 

 wall, and the broken side windows are about the same distance from the east, 

 and nearly opposite to each other. The northern (as we noted) retains its sill. 

 It was unglazed, but had a weather-shutter, turning in a socket, as was common 

 in castles of the same period. The basin-stone, or font, is a block of grey 

 conglomerate, 25 inches by 27 inches, with a round basin 15 inches across. 

 The large east window commands a beautiful view of the great mountains on 

 the mainland. The splay is 5 feet wide, with plain jambs and a segmental 

 splay arch, over which is a very neat relieving arch. 1 To the south is a broken 

 recess, or ambry, filled with bleached skulls, very frail and weathered ; beside 

 it in the south wall is a smaller ambry, perhaps for a credence- table. The 

 gable is propped by clumsy buttresses, over 5 feet square, packed with dry 

 rubble. The northern, its case of mortared masonry having been broken, is 

 now hollow, the dry, loose material having slipped out ; the southern is intact. 

 How the published accounts gave " 61 feet by 23 feet outside" is impossible 

 to explain. (Plate X.) 



There are no early monuments, and few modern ones with inscriptions — 

 a beautifully carved headstone with a pathetic epitaph commemorates the 

 Rev. Henry Basil Allies, who died in July, 1897, after twenty-nine years 

 of priesthood. Inside the church, in the north-east corner, is a long 

 Latin inscription in such unusual lettering as to suggest that the sculptor 

 copied his exemplar blindly. It commemorates the virtues and labours of 

 Eev. Martin Fadden, the coadjutor on the island, who died in March, 1820, and 

 whose unsparing efforts to tend the living and bury the dead of his flock, 

 whose bodies he brought hither with his own hands during an epidemic (of 

 cholera morbus), are recorded. The epitaph alludes to the church — " Hie intra 

 muros veteres Sancti Colmani ecclesiae dormit." At the east window on the 

 altar-site is a table-tomb of James Mac Cormack, September, 1875, and in 

 the end room, one of Essex Summons Philips, February, 1834, aged 5, the son 

 of Essex Philips. 



1 A very inaccurate view is given in Canon O'Hanlon's " Lives of the Irish Saints," vol. i, p. 197. 



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