Overview
Two granite cross-slabs on the tower at Fuerty carry names carved more than a thousand years ago, one of them Ardeachan, an abbot of Clonmacnoise. They are the reason to stop at what looks, from the R366, like an ordinary roadside graveyard a few kilometres northwest of Roscommon town. It is a small, quiet site off the main tourist routes, and it will not take much more than half an hour.
St Ciarán and the abbey
Local tradition has St Patrick passing through in the fifth century and leaving a deacon, Justus, to found a community here. It was Justus, the story goes, who baptised a local boy named Ciarán around the year 500 – the same Ciarán who went on to found Clonmacnoise on the Shannon, one of early medieval Europe’s great monastic schools. Whatever the exact history, Fuerty sits within that founding network of Irish Christian sites.
The abbey’s later story is a violent one. It suffered in the Elizabethan wars, and Skeffington Gibbon’s 1829 account records that during the Cromwellian conquest troops under a Colonel Ormsby burned the abbey and killed more than a hundred elderly clergy sheltering there. The detail comes down through 19th-century writing rather than contemporary record, but it fits the upheavals of the period.
The cross-slabs and the church
The two granite slabs, mounted on the west side of the tower, are the real thing to see. Their inscriptions are still legible – one carries the name of Ardeachan, Abbot of Clonmacnoise – a direct link to the monastic network that ran across the midlands. They are usually dated to the 8th century, though some accounts put them a century or two later; either way, you are reading names cut well over a thousand years ago.
The standing walls belong to a much later Church of Ireland building that replaced the monastery, with a bell tower added in 1790. Fire left it roofless in the 19th century, and the weathered nave and chancel are what remain.
Visiting
There is no gate and no admission, and roadside parking on the R366. There are no facilities on site; Roscommon town, about 5 km away, is the place for refreshments and toilets. A short, level path leads in from the road, though the ground around the graveyard is uneven, so wear decent shoes.
Combine it with Roscommon town and its castle, a walk by the Shannon, or a stretch of the Roscommon Greenway. Come in early morning or late afternoon and the low light picks out the carved slabs before the place settles back into quiet.