The story of Movilla Abbey
St Finnian founded Movilla in 540 AD, and the name comes from the Gaelic Mainistir Mhaigh Bhile, the monastery on the plain of the ancient tree. Finnian, born around 495 and thought to be a native of Ulster, brought back from Rome a complete copy of the Latin Vulgate Bible, said to be the only complete Bible in Ireland at the time. By the seventh century Movilla had grown into one of the greatest monasteries in the country, a centre of Celtic Christian learning, with archaeology since revealing pottery, metalworking and glasswork on the site.
Its position only a mile inland from Strangford Lough made it a target. In 824 Vikings sailed in, killed and plundered, and burned the wooden settlement. Movilla never fully recovered. It was united with Bangor Abbey in the tenth century, then revived in the twelfth when St Malachy of Armagh re-established it as a house of Augustinian Canons, dedicated to St Malachy.
The Augustinian abbey survived until the suppression of the religious houses in the 1540s. The church that stands today is partly 13th and partly 15th century, the later rebuilding leaving the carved traceried window in the west gable. In the late nineteenth century the medieval coffin lids were gathered and set into the north wall for protection, where they remain.
Today Movilla is a state-care monument inside an active municipal cemetery, looked after by the Department for Communities. The roofless walls, the carved slabs and the lone ringed-cross stone of Dertrend are what is left of more than a thousand years of Christian worship on this one plot of ground.