Mount Melleray Abbey, Trappist monastery in County Waterford, Ireland

Mount Melleray Abbey is a Trappist monastery on the slopes of the Knockmealdown Mountains near Cappoquin, County Waterford. Founded in 1832, it closed in January 2025, when its remaining six monks moved to Mount Saint Joseph Abbey, Roscrea. In 2026 it became a campus of Ave Maria University, a Florida-based Catholic university, in partnership with the Cistercian Order. Its church was built with cut limestone blocks bought from Mitchelstown Castle after the castle was burnt in 1922.

The monastery was founded in 1832 by Irish and English monks expelled from a monastery in Brittany, France. They rebuilt their community on a remote hillside in Ireland, far from where they had originally settled.

The five Kilgrovan Stones, bearing Ogham inscriptions, were found in 1857 and brought to the abbey in 1900 by Patrick Power. The monastery also appears in Irish letters: James Joyce names it in "The Dead" (1914), and Seán Ó Ríordáin's poem Cnoc Mellerí, in Eireaball Spideoige (1952), is built around it.

Mount Melleray closed as a monastery in January 2025, when its last six monks moved to Mount Saint Joseph Abbey in Roscrea; from 2026 the site is a campus of Ave Maria University, run with the Cistercian Order. Check current access arrangements before travelling, as the grounds are no longer a working Trappist monastery. The abbey stands on the slopes of the Knockmealdown Mountains near Cappoquin, reached by road from the town.

During the Great Famine, the monastery took in and fed refugees in 1849, a fact noted by writer Thomas Carlyle who visited at the time. His account is one of the few written records that captured this act of care from that period.