Mainistir Muire Árd na Ría — the Augustinian Abbey of St Mary of Ardnaree

The ruins of Ardnaree Friary stand on the east bank of the River Moy in Ballina, Co. Mayo, in the shadow of St Muredach’s Cathedral. Of the four medieval religious houses on and adjacent to the lower Moy, this one alone was an O’Dubhda foundation — built by the chief of the O’Dubhda himself, in the heart of his lordship, and continuously patronised by his family until the Tudor suppression. It is, in the literal sense, the O’Dubhda abbey.

I. Name and Setting

The Irish form recorded by logainm.ie is Ard na Ría. The name has attracted more than one interpretation. John O’Donovan, writing the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1836, read it as Ard na Riagh, “the hill of the executions.” A parallel tradition, preserved in later popular usage, glosses it as Árd na Ríogh, “the height of the kings.” The scholarly consensus is cautious: the medieval spellings are ambiguous, and both readings have left their mark on local memory.

An earlier parish church stood on this site long before the Augustinian house was built: the Ecclesia de Ardnariu is recorded in a clerical taxation of 1306, valued at £4. The friary was raised over, or beside, this existing foundation in the early fifteenth century.

II. The O’Dubhda Foundation, c. 1427

Most modern authorities date the foundation of the Augustinian house at Ardnaree to about 1427, and name its founder as Tadhg Riabhach Ó Dubhda, Taoiseach of Tireragh and king of Uí Fhiachrach Muaidhe. Tadhg had succeeded to the chieftaincy in 1417 and was one of the most active O’Dubhda lords of the later middle ages — known also as a generous patron of the Mac Fhirbhisigh scholars at Lecan.

The house was built for friars of the Order of St Augustine — the Augustinian Friars or “Hermits” — and was known in the later record as the Augustinian House of St Mary of Ardnaree. A bronze plaque at the site gives the foundation date as 1425; the slight discrepancy is a matter of the tradition embedded in civic memory as against the date settled by historians in the twentieth century.

The O’Dubhda remained patrons of Ardnaree until the dissolution. Chieftains of the family were interred in the adjoining ground: Muircheartach Ó Dubhda, son of Donnchadh, was buried here in 1402 — at the earlier parish church that the Augustinian friary would later replace — which establishes Ardnaree as a recognised burial place of the family from well before the friary’s formal foundation.

III. A House of Learning

The friary became a centre of religious learning in north Connacht. Among the priests associated with the house was Gerald Martyn, O.S.A., who was appointed Bishop of Killala in 1452 — a measure of the abbey’s standing in the province. The abbey’s architectural fabric, with its carved doorways and wall tombs, also bears witness to sustained lay patronage: whole families paid to be buried in niches cut into its walls.

IV. Dissolution under Elizabeth I

The general dissolution of the Irish monasteries began under Henry VIII with the Act of 1537, but in remote Connacht it was enforced only slowly. Ardnaree was formally suppressed in the later sixteenth century; its lands were leased out during the reign of Elizabeth I, and the roofed community came to an end.

V. The Battle of Ardnaree, 23 September 1586

The event that lodged Ardnaree most deeply in the national record happened on the friary’s doorstep. On 23 September 1586, Sir Richard Bingham, Governor of Connacht, surprised and destroyed an Irish-Scottish mercenary army that the Mayo Burkes and the Mac Philbins had invited into Connacht to resist Elizabethan authority. The bloodletting was extraordinary: roughly a thousand fighting men killed in the field, and close to another thousand men, women and children put to the sword in the camp behind the lines.

Bingham afterwards hanged the leaders of the Burkes on the ground where they fell. An older Irish source gives the aftermath in language that has never quite worn off the place: “Every limb was struck off of them while they lived, and they were hung by the neck, and executed, and thence was Ard na Riag, the hill of the hangings, the name of the place thereafter.” Whether or not the name predates the battle, it is from 1586 that “the hill of the executions” becomes the name by which Ardnaree is remembered.

Four years later, in 1590, Bingham’s army returned to the lower Moy to burn the Franciscan houses at Moyne and Rosserk and the Dominican priory at Rathfran. The Augustinian abbey at Ardnaree had no roofed community left to burn, but the cumulative effect of these years was the end of monastic Christendom on the lower Moy.

VI. Titular Priors and a Persisting Graveyard

The Augustinian province continued to appoint titular priors to Ardnaree long after there was any house at Ardnaree for them to prior over: the line of appointments runs on into the nineteenth century. It is a Penal-era pattern known from many Irish houses: the superior was nominated, the faith was kept, the buildings stood open to the sky.

The graveyard around the ruins went on being used as the burying ground of Ardnaree. The Urban District Council formally closed it for new interments in 1930, though families with existing rights continued to bury their dead there into the 1950s. The headstones span several centuries.

VII. Surviving Fabric

The most striking element to survive is a pointed Gothic arch with finely carved stonework, marking what was once a principal doorway of the abbey church. Sections of the church’s walls stand in places to a good height, and the churchyard around them preserves tomb niches cut into the stonework — a reminder that the abbey served, to the last, as a place of burial for the lay patrons who had kept it alive.

A bronze plaque at the site, cast with the arms of the borough of Ballina, gives the foundation date as 1425. The abbey is stop 14 on the Ballina Historic Town Trail, and an on-site information board sets out the history in Irish and English.

VIII. Visiting Today

The site is freely accessible on foot, just above the Moy and a short walk from St Muredach’s Cathedral. Those making a tour of O’Dubhda heritage around Ballina will find the abbey pairs naturally with Ardnarea Castle, built by Tadhg Riabhach’s grandson Brian in 1447, a few hundred metres further up the east bank. The three great friaries of Killala Bay — Moyne, Rosserk and Rathfran — are all within a short drive to the north.