Corcomroe Abbey

In a quiet valley beneath the grey limestone hills of the north Burren, near Bellharbour, the Cistercian abbey of Corcomroe, Petra Fertilis, the fertile rock, was founded at the end of the 12th century by an O'Brien king, most likely Donal Cairbreach, who brought monks from Inislounaght, on the border between the O'Loughlin and O'Conor lands. Its church, built between about 1210 and 1225 in the style known as the School of the West, has a rib-vaulted presbytery with deeply undercut chevron, three lancets in the east gable and capitals carved with human heads and flowers, among them poppies, lilies of the valley and lotus. In a niche in the chancel lies the effigy of King Conor na Siúdaine O'Brien, killed in 1268, his sceptre broken. The quality of the carving falls away beyond the transepts, perhaps after the famines of the late 1220s. Reviewers praise the stillness and the evening light, and suggest the field across the road for a wider photograph; the approach road is very narrow.