County: Cork Site name: Buttevant
Sites and Monuments Record No.: CO017-053004- Licence number: E004896; C000825
Author: Eamonn Cotter
Site type: Religious house - Franciscan friars
Period/Dating: —
ITM: E 554317m, N 609080m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 52.231565, -8.668756
Buttevant’s Franciscan friary is believed to have been built in or around 1250. The church survives but the cloister is now a modern graveyard. The church was built on ground sloping steeply towards the Awbeg River, and to compensate for the slope a two-storey crypt was built under the choir of the church.
Excavations around the four window embrasures in the east wall of the crypt were carried out in conjunction with a programme of conservation of the church by the Office of Public Works. Deposits removed from the embrasures were modern. Little survived of the original windows themselves: on the upper floor the south window has been completely rebuilt and nothing of the original survives, while in the north window the original 13th-century masonry has been partially blocked and a later medieval window inserted. In the embrasure of this window some original plaster survived, with evidence for applied paintwork. On the ground floor some of the 13th-century cut stone survives in both windows but the window heads have not.
Ballynanelagh, Rathcormac, Co. Cork
