Mainistir Mhuraisce
The ruined friary on the shore, founded by the O’Malleys in 1457 and still standing between the mountain and the sea.
Murrisk Abbey stands on the shore below the village, close enough to the water that the tide comes up to the field wall. It was founded in 1457 by Hugh O’Malley for the Augustinian friars, on land the O’Malleys held along this coast, and it was suppressed in the sixteenth century like the rest. What is left is the church and part of the east range, roofless, with a fine traceried east window that is the thing everyone photographs.
It is a small building and it does not take long to walk around, but it rewards going slowly. The battlemented walls are unusual for a friary, and the piscina inside the chancel has survived better than the roof did. Grace O’Malley, Gráinne Mhaol, was of the family that built it, and it is a short leap from the window to her castle on Clare Island out in the bay.
Next to it, on the road, is the National Famine Memorial, John Behan’s bronze coffin ship with skeletons in the rigging, unveiled in 1997. The two sit together well. One is the stone of a family who ruled this coast, the other the memory of the people who left it, and both look across the same water to the same islands.
I walk down there most weeks. In the evening, with the sun going behind Clare Island and the mountain at your back, it is as quiet a place as I know.