For a ruin this complete, Burriscarra is remarkably overlooked. Its church, sacristy and domestic ranges add up to one of the most extensive sets of Augustinian friary remains in Ireland, yet there is no car park, no ticket desk and, most days, no one here at all, just the headstones of a graveyard still in use. You climb a stone stile to get in.
If you have twenty minutes in this corner of Mayo, it is a fair way to spend them. The natural move, though, is to pair it with Ballintubber Abbey, the grander, still-active church four kilometres south, and make a morning of the two.
Two orders, one ruin
The Anglo-Norman Adam de Staunton, whose family later took the name MacEvilly, founded a Carmelite priory here around 1298; the same family built the castle, Castlecarra, just up the road. The Carmelites drifted away, and by 1383 the place stood empty. In 1413 it passed to the Augustinian friars, who already had a house at Ballinrobe, and it is their era the stones remember.
A fire gutted the church in 1430. The friars rebuilt, and most of what stands today is that 15th-century work: a south aisle opening through a two-arch arcade, a traceried east window, and, set into the chancel wall, a piscina for washing the altar vessels and a row of sedilia, the clergy’s stone seats, with worn carved heads above them. The friary was dissolved in 1607; its lands went to John King, then Oliver Bowen, and on to the Lynch family, who held them into the 19th century. The Office of Public Works took the ruin on and steadied the stonework in the 1960s.
Visiting
Burriscarra is a mile west of Carnacon, on the north-east shore of Lough Carra, with a small lay-by on the R310 to leave the car. It is open all the time, free, and completely unstaffed. There are no toilets, no café and no shelter; the ground is rough grass and exposed stone, so it is not one for wheelchairs or pushchairs; and you are sharing the site with a working graveyard, so tread carefully and keep dogs on the lead.
Make a loop of it. Castlecarra, the de Stauntons’ hall-house, sits 1.2 km to the south-west above the lake; Ballintubber Abbey, founded in 1216 and still a place of pilgrimage, is under 4 km south; and the shallow limestone expanse of Lough Carra hides ancient stone causeways out in the water, some of them dated to well over three thousand years ago.
The abbey takes no time and asks nothing of you but care among the graves. Come for the quiet and the carved heads, then drive the four kilometres to Ballintubber and see what this place might have grown into.