Carving on the capital of the right column in the southern
chapel of the Cistercian Abbey of Corcomroe, County Galway, Ireland. The
carving is in the style of transitional work from Late Romanesque to Gothic,
termed the "School of the West" style, in the abbeys of Boyle.
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. At Corcomroe, and also at
Boyle, there is such
as degree of non-conformity that it must have been more than a rare
example of an individual stone mason's creativity.
![Corcomcoe_Abbey_051_2013](../images/Corcomcoe_Abbey_051_2013.jpg)
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