Rathfran Friary, County Mayo - well worth a visit

The grey ruin of Rathfran Friary lies quietly in timeless majesty beside a hidden inlet, remote and unpeopled along the western shore of Killala Bay. Its tragic starkness only softens when dense banks of wet mist roll it from the sea to swirl around its broken walls like a soothing vapour that confuses the outline of the smoke-dressed stones and blends them into the darkening, watery sky. A leaden weight of absence and desolation hangs heavily among the barely moving reeds that skirt the shoreline where birds flit between the rich feeding grounds and their nests that sit high and undisturbed in broken chimney stacks.

It’s good to come out to the Friary not long before dusk begins to gather on a warm summer evening, to leave all that you possess on the track by the holy well and follow the path that marks the line of the highest tides, to kick among the salt-bleached bones of dead crabs and come across, from time to time, the long-naked skull of a rotted sheep. Yes it’s good. The crunch of the stones and shingle sounds good to the ears, the smell of the salt and decay taste good in the mouth. All your senses agree that this is a good place to be, and it’s even better to be there on your own and allow the leavings of past generations haunt your mind and fire your imagination, let them offend your naïve sense of justice and discolour your long-settled views of who you are, to challenge your understanding of this world’s ways.

A Dominican Friary off a forgotten Irish beach with only ghosts for company; a place for sitting among sunken graves and the scattered remnants of an ancient hearth. A place that speaks of a once well-practiced love put to the sword and the torch, yet even in the remembering of cruelty and hardship long passed into history and covered by centuries of new grass, a quietness of spirit can be found. Here the repugnant dates and names belonging to the past pile up and gather around to form a refuge where the searching soul can rest, no longer striving for answers and meaning and revenge, but listening for the soft echo of the love and labour that once graced this obscure and now man-forsaken place.

(There are similar ruins nearby at Moyne and Rossek, both well worth seeing - if you like that sort of thing).