Fíodhnach · Co. Leitrim
A scatter of houses in south Leitrim built around two abbey ruins and a divinity school that once pulled students from across Europe.
Fenagh is small - a handful of houses, a national school, a church, one pub and a visitor centre, set on the R202 about five kilometres southwest of Ballinamore. The name comes from the Irish Fíodhnach, the woody place. You come here for the abbey ruins and the deep monastic history under the field, not for a night out.
The story is St Caillin's. He is said to have arrived from Dunmore in Co. Galway around the 5th or 6th century and founded a monastery that grew into one of the more serious schools of early Christian Ireland. The Annals of the Four Masters describe Fenagh as celebrated for its divinity school, resorted to by students from every part of Europe. Saint Mogue of neighbouring Templeport was among the pupils. The community survived in some form for over a thousand years - sacked by Cromwellian soldiers in 1652, hit by cannon fire in the Williamite wars of 1690, with the last service said in 1729.
What stands now are two church ruins on the shore of Fenagh Lough, including a Gothic shell with a 17th-century penal cross, and a graveyard where local tradition says nineteen Gaelic kings lie. Scattered around the village are a portal tomb, a giant's grave and standing stones that the old stories call the petrified bodies of druids who tried to drive St Caillin out. The Book of Fenagh, completed at the monastery in 1516 and now held at the Royal Irish Academy, recorded the saint's life from an older lost manuscript and remains a key source for medieval Leitrim.
The novelist John McGahern lived out his last thirty years in the townland of Aughaboneill nearby, and the flat drumlin country around Fenagh is the landscape of Amongst Women and That They May Face the Rising Sun. It is quiet, low and watery. Bring boots and an hour to spare among the ruins.