St. Columba's Church
Durrow Abbey is a historic site in Durrow, County Offaly in Ireland. It is 5 kilometres (3 mi) north of the centre of Tullamore (8 kilometres (5 mi) via the N52 road). Largely undisturbed, the site is an early medieval monastic complex of ecclesiastical and secular monuments, visible and sub-surface. Durrow was probably founded by Columba around the 550s, and during his life and for centuries after was a well known centre of education. The Venerable Bede called it Monasterium nobile in Hiberniâ, and, at a later period, Armagh and Durrow were called the "Universities of the West". Durrow, like Clonard, Derry, and most other monasteries in the area, was frequently ravaged by the Vikings, but was not completely destroyed until the Norman invasion. The famous illuminated manuscript Book of Durrow, now at Trinity College, Dublin, was at the abbey by 916 at the latest, although it may have been made elsewhere. Discovered in the hands of a local farmer after the Reformation, the book is regarded as the earliest surviving fully decorated Insular Gospel book. It is believed to date from the 7th or 8th century, though the date is a matter of long-standing controversy. The extant monuments at the site include a large ecclesiastical enclosure, five Early Christian grave slabs, a mid-ninth century high cross, a fragment of a cross shaft, a complete cross-head (now in the National Museum of Ireland) and cross base, a holy well and other archaeological features. The Anglo-Norman Hugh de Lacy, Lord of Meath built a motte at the abbey in 1180, using the stones, and was killed at the abbey in 1186 by an Irishman, one of his workmen. Remarkably, the site saw a second murder of an earl in 1839, when Hector John Graham-Toler, 2nd Earl of Norbury was shot "by an assassin, in his own plantation".
