Mainistir Ros Eirc — a Franciscan Third Order house on the lower Moy

Rosserk Friary stands on a low elevation on the east bank of the River Moy, where the river widens out to meet Killala Bay in north Co. Mayo. It is among the most complete medieval friaries surviving in Ireland, and lies squarely within the old O’Dubhda lordship of Tír Fhiachrach.

The interpretive plaque erected by the Office of Public Works on site records that the friary was founded c. 1460 by a member of the Joyce family for a community of the Third Order of St Francis — an order for married men and women who wished to follow a Franciscan rule without taking the vows of the friars or the nuns. An older tradition, preserved on the nearby “Sacred Landscapes” interpretive sign, dates the foundation a little earlier, between 1400 and 1441, and notes that the house was known as “the Chancellorship of Killala.” What is not in doubt is that the Joyces were a powerful Anglo-Welsh family who had settled in Connacht in the thirteenth century, and that their foundation here, in the fifteenth, sat inside the territorial heartland of the O’Dubhda.

Across the Moy to Castleconnor

From the walls of the friary the view west is one of the finest in the district. The river broadens here into the open water of the estuary, and directly across the Moy — on the Sligo bank, in the old Barony of Tireragh — stands Castleconnor (Caisleán Mhic Conchúir), one of the great O’Dubhda castles of the lower Moy, held by the family from at least 1371 until the seventeenth century. Rosserk and Castleconnor face each other across the water; the friars, coming out of Vespers, would have looked across at the O’Dubhda tower on the opposite shore.

An earlier sacred place

The site appears to have been a place of veneration long before the friars came. Local tradition — as recorded on the site signage — derives the name from Ros Serce, after Searc, a woman remembered as a miracle-working anchoress and a disciple of St Patrick, said to have lived here. The same tradition holds that Rosserk is mentioned in ecclesiastical writings as early as c. 1198. The official placename record, however, gives the Irish name as Ros Eirc — “the wood, or headland, of Eirc” — and we record both readings here without trying to force a choice between them.

Architecture and notable carvings

Rosserk is compact but remarkably complete. The church stands on the south side of a small cloister, with a slender bell-tower over the chancel arch and a fine four-light traceried east window behind the high altar. On the opposite (north) side of the cloister runs the refectory; to the east, the sacristy and chapter house lie against the choir, with the dormitory on the upper floor above.

The friary is best known for a single object: a double piscina set into the south wall of the choir, a carved stone recess of two arched basins once used to wash the sacred vessels of the Mass. On one of its slender pillars the medieval mason carved a miniature round tower — one of the only known medieval depictions of an Irish round tower, and, as the OPW record notes, almost certainly copied from the standing ruins of a much older monastery that the carver had seen for himself. Above the round-tower carving, small angel figures support the cornice of the piscina; further angels and carved passion-symbols appear nearby in the choir.

Burned in 1590

In 1590 Rosserk was burned by Sir Richard Bingham, Elizabeth I’s Lord President of Connacht, in the same campaign that saw Moyne Abbey and Rathfran Priory sacked. The friary was never restored as a living community, though the Franciscans are known to have kept a shadow presence in north Mayo into the seventeenth century. The ruin has stood open to the weather ever since.

Visiting today

Rosserk is a National Monument in the care of the Office of Public Works. Access is free and unrestricted; a short lane off the R314 between Ballina and Killala leads down to the site, and there is space to park a car at the gate. It sits in open farmland on the river’s edge, and combines naturally with a visit to Moyne Abbey a short distance to the north. Together with Rathfran further up the coast, the three sites make a single afternoon’s walk through the medieval monastic landscape of O’Dubhda country.