Religious Buildings, Landscape & Material Culture

Recording Convent Heritage

A Quick Guide to Recording Convent Heritage was published by The Heritage Council in May 2025. This guide has three aims:   

  1. to raise awareness of the urgent necessity to record convents and land associated with female religious orders and;  

  2. to outline the significance of convents and their collections and suggest ways to record, and in limited cases preserve, elements of the material culture and architectural and landscape heritage of Irish convents and;  

  3. to describe these recording and collection methods through practical guides included as the appendices to this document. 

By clicking on the image above you can download the guide (or click on the link listed below). For hardcopies of the guide please contact The Heritage Council.

Following extensive conversations with Religious Sisters, Congregational and Diocesan archivists it became apparent that while there are resources available for those involved in the collection, sale and disposal of buildings, grounds and the material culture within the buildings these resources are scattered across different government departments, agencies and organisations. Below are links to relevant documents. If there are others please contact me (using the 'Contact’ tab) and I’ll add those PDFs to those below.

An example of the sort of information about religious buildings, landscapes and contents can be seen in the exhibition: Branching Out: Presentation Convents 1775-1828

Branching Out: Presentation Convents 1775-1828

During the Spring and Summer of 2023 I travelled around Ireland researching a new exhibition to be hosted by Nano Nagle Place in Cork.

The exhibition focusses on the 22 Presentation Convents that were established before Catholic Emancipation. Using a mix of images, film, artefacts, plans, interviews and site visits the exhibition records the earliest Presentation Convents which were spread across 14 counties. You can see the whole exhibition by clicking on this link: Branching Out Exhibition

Above is a short talk which introduces the Branching Out exhibition and to the right is a talk about Georgian Dublin, Teresa Mulally and the founding of the Presentation Convent on George’s Hill.

South Pres.png

‘Hidden in Plain Sight’: Irish Convents in the 18th & 19th centuries

‘Hidden in Plain Sight’ is a collaborative project which I run with architectural historian Jessie Castle. The impact of the convent on Irish architecture, garden design and urban design is substantial and almost completely undocumented. In the 18th century the Irish convent, as an essentially underground and resistance operation, had to employ a discreetly subversive means of expression. The convent complexes constructed through the 19th century were often of great urban, architectural and landscape merit. The convent is a microcosm of Irish society and this project reveals the impact of nuns on the social fabric of Ireland in an era in which women’s roles have largely been overlooked.

Convents were significant buildings in Irish cities, towns and villages from the late 18th century until well into the 20th century. Nuns were influential figures in their communities, not only through their association with religion and education, but also as employers. They commissioned and re-appropriated many important buildings and landscapes, creating sites of architectural and cultural significance. Over the last five years we have visited many convents to record their architectural and landscape heritage before the re-development of such sites transforms them beyond recognition. We have combined site visits with archival materials including account books, visual sources, correspondence, diocesan records and newspapers in order to evaluate the ways in which the presence of convents impacted on the built environment, landscape and material culture of Ireland.

Below you will find links to several outputs relating to our project. The first is an article about the two convents built by Nano Nagle (the founder of the Presentation Sisters) in Cork in the 1770s, the second is a report on the cultural heritage of convents, the second and the third focusses more broadly on the life of Nano Nagle.

Nano Nagle's Convents

Show & Tell

In this talk Jessie Castle & I discuss how we developed the ‘Changing Habits: 250 Years of Convent Life’ exhibition. We discuss (and show) a lot of the archival material and artefacts that we used in our research. We talk about some very surprising find including the ‘nun doll’, a considerable alcohol bill and a large (and noisy) bell!