Mount Melleray Abbey to close after almost 200 years with a final Mass

Several pilgrims are expected to visit the site throughout the week, with the order saying that there have been many enquiries regarding times of Masses and other ceremonies

Crowds gathering at Mount Melleray Abbey for the consecration of the church and the feast of Saint Bernard, circa 1952. Picture: Waterford County Museum

Pilgrims are flocking one last time to one of Munster’s best-known abbeys, run by the Cistercian monks in Waterford.

Mount Melleray Abbey, near Cappoquin, will close on Saturday, almost two centuries after it was founded in the 1830s by an Irish-born monk who returned to Ireland from the Cistercians’s monastery in Melleray, France.