placenamesBoyounagh
Buíbheanach
The old graveyard preserves architectural fragments from several centuries of worship and commemoration.
The name
A reliable full-name meaning has not been established here. The recorded Irish and English forms are given without an unsupported translation.
Recorded forms
- Buíbheanach · Irish · main form · validated name
- Boyounagh · English · main form
Place & story
Reading the church remains
Only a fragment of the medieval church’s north wall survives above ground in Boyounagh’s old graveyard. An archaeological survey undertaken during cemetery improvements in the 1990s identified masonry from several periods. A curved doorway fragment belonged to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, while worked sandstone suggested a much earlier Romanesque building. Other squared stones had acquired a second use as uninscribed markers over later graves. [2]
The carved beast
Among the finds was a sandstone corbel carved as a beast’s head, with large eyes, pointed ears and a long snout. Such projecting stones supported the timbers at a church’s gable. Archaeologist Christy Cunniffe identified the carving as twelfth-century work and compared its dragonesque decoration with corbels at Temple Cronan in north Clare. The fragment therefore supplies evidence for Boyounagh’s place within Galway’s Romanesque church architecture. [3]
A merchant’s family vault
The cemetery also holds a later record of landed ownership. Glenamaddy’s heritage project records that merchant Martin McDonnell purchased the Boyounagh estate in 1853, including eight townlands around the old ecclesiastical centre. He built a family vault at the summit of the cemetery in 1872 and was buried there in 1905. Displaced moulded limestone from the McDonnell tomb was among the material identified during the archaeological survey. [4] [2]
Geographic information
Sources & further reading
- Logainm.ie — Boyounagh. Place names and geographic record, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Boyounagh Monastic Site Archaeology · Pat Keaveny, Solas Magazine 1998; Glenamaddy Boyounagh Heritage Project
- Romanesque dragon · Christy Cunniffe, Galway Community Archaeology
- Glenamaddy Boyounagh Parish · Glenamaddy Boyounagh Heritage Project
Name record retrieved 2026-10-25 · Source record modified 2021-03-19. How this page was prepared.