Some of the vegetal carving in the Cistercian Abbey at Boyle, County Roscommon, Ireland. When the nave
was completed, approximately 40 new capitals were needed, both for the
newly constructed piers and for the corbels, which had been inserted
along the building to support the roof. Some of the capitals have
trumpet scallops, suggesting a West of England influence. However, the
majority were decorated with a range of floral motifs, similar to the
transitional work from Gothic to Romanesque, termed the "School of the
West" style, in the abbeys of Cong and Ballintubber and Athenry Castle.
The term “School of the West” was coined by Harold Leask to a group of a
dozen churches built west of the River Shannon in the first half of the
13th century which have architectural details that cannot be found in
contemporary buildings in the rest of Ireland. In some ways this term
has been used to stress the conflict between ‘native’ Cistercian houses
and those founded by the Anglo-Norman invaders and the vernacular and
Cistercian influence in the west of Ireland abbeys.
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