Church, Glebe, Co. Wexford

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Church, Glebe, Co. Wexford

On a south-east-facing slope in County Wexford, a raised D-shaped enclosure marks the site of a parish church that has entirely ceased to exist.

The earthen bank and hedge that define the old graveyard of Kilnenor still stand to around one and a half metres, enclosing an area roughly fifty-three metres by forty-six, but of the church itself there is nothing left, not a stone course, not a foundation line. What survives is essentially the container without its contents.

The church had a documented life well into the seventeenth century. A visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, recorded that the curate at the time was one Garret McTege and that both the church and its chancel were then in good repair. Sometime between that point and the mid-nineteenth century the building was lost entirely. The scholar and topographer John O'Donovan, writing in the nineteenth century, noted that it had already been destroyed by then, and no physical trace remained to examine. Closely associated with the vanished church was Kilnenor Well, a rectangular structure of drystone walling, the technique of laying stone without mortar, situated about thirty metres to the south-west of where the church once stood. The well was the site of a pattern, meaning the local observance of a patron saint's feast day, held each year on the eighth of September. That practice continued until 1798, a year whose upheavals across Wexford likely disrupted many such customs permanently. The well itself survives and feeds a stream that runs away to the south-east.

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