Holiday - Northern Ireland - 1 September - Inch Abbey

After Saul Church we went over to Inch Abbey. The following information was taken from pamphlets about the sites from the Downpatrick community center, Department for Communities. "Inch Abbey was originally the location of a church called Inis Cumhscraigh situated on an Island in Quolie River marshes north of Downpatrick. Only fragments of this church survive. It was plundered by the Vikings in 1002 in a raid led by Sitric, King of the Danes. 

The Norman Knight John de Courcy and his wife Affreca replaced the early church in 1177 with a Cistercian monastery and populated it with monks from Furnss Abbey in northern England. He commissioned one of these monks - a man called Jocelyn of Barrow-in-Furness, to re-write the legends of Saint Patrick and it might have been at Inch that the story of St Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland was written. This legend refers to the ousting of evil from the Island of Ireland. 

The abbey at Inch follows a standard Cistercian plan with a cruciform (cross shaped) church constructed in the gothic style c. 1200. The church consisted of an aisled nave to the west, two projecting transepts to the north and south and the un-aisled chancel to the east. This chancel with its elegant triple pointed lancet windows and the clustered pier in the chapel was far from sophisticated than any that existed in Ireland at that time. The putlogs (open scaffolding holes) remain visible in the chancel. "

As we were leaving the Inch a wedding party arrived to take photos and when we were back in the parking lot I thought it was pretty cool that they had these cars for the wedding party. Another fun thing we learned in the parking lot was that Game of Thrones filmed on location at Inch Abbey as well and there are now groups that come to the Abbey daily dressed in GoT attire. GoT is huge and I feel like the 1% that has never seen it.