A small rare thing
The mortuary house
The little stone building beside the church is what archaeologists call a house tomb or saint's tomb — a permanent shrine built to hold the relics of a venerated dead person. It is of rubble construction with a single pitched slab roof. The body-shaped cavity inside is matched by a hand-hole at the east end through which medieval pilgrims could reach in and touch the bones. The companion piece is at Banagher Old Church to the north-west, where St Muirdagh's tomb stands taller and steeper. Bovevagh's is plainer, decayed, and easier to miss. There are only a few of these surviving in Ireland. Stand beside it for two minutes and the whole vocabulary of Irish church architecture gets a footnote you didn't know existed.
St Ringan, or Aidan, or nobody now remembers
Whose saint?
Local tradition holds that the mortuary house is the tomb shrine of St Ringan. The older monastery on the site is associated with St Aidan — said to be a nephew of St Patrick — who was named first abbot when the foundation was put down. Columb Cille gets credited too, as he does with half the early sites in the north. The dates and the names slide around. What is certain is that someone here was important enough that a stone house was built over their bones and people came, for centuries, to put a hand inside.
A timber church, then a stone one, then a ruin
The old church
A timber church — a dertech in the old word — stood on this ground in 1100 and was recorded burning that year. The medieval parish church that replaced it was already reported as ruined in 1622 but was patched and used into the 19th century before being abandoned for good. The walls you see now are the medieval church with later mends. The east window survives, and a fair stretch of the south wall, and a graveyard that is still in use. The newer Bovevagh parish churches — Church of Ireland and Presbyterian — sit elsewhere in the parish and carry the worship on.
An older name underneath
Both Mhéabha
Both Mhéabha — anglicised as Bovevagh — means Maeve's hut or Maeve's booley. A booley is a summer shieling, the temporary dwelling that herders used when cattle were brought up to higher pasture. Maeve is the queen-goddess of the older Irish mythological cycles. Whether the name points to a real woman, a goddess, or just an old place-name lost in the long grass, the church was built on ground that already had a name and a history. That is the usual story for Irish monastic sites. Christian on top of older.