site of Friary, Coolgreany Demesne, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Ecclesiastical Sites

site of Friary, Coolgreany Demesne, Co. Wexford

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of 1839 and 1940, a patch of ground in Coolgreany Demesne, County Wexford, carries the label "Friary (Site of)".

That designation implies a religious house of some consequence, yet nothing visible survives. No masonry, no earthwork, no trace of foundation interrupts the farmyard that now occupies the area. Whatever was once here has been thoroughly absorbed into the landscape.

The only physical relic is a stone mortar turned up by a plough at some point and kept at a nearby house, the kind of heavy grinding vessel associated with monastic kitchens or infirmaries. Beyond that, the evidence is cartographic and toponymic rather than structural. Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, recorded the surrounding land as "Abbey Lands", a place-name that tends to preserve the memory of ecclesiastical ownership long after buildings have vanished. Local tradition offers a possible explanation: the site may have functioned as an out-farm attached to the friary at Monature, a Franciscan house elsewhere in County Wexford. Out-farms, sometimes called granges, were working agricultural dependencies that allowed friaries to manage land holdings at a distance from the main complex. If that interpretation is correct, there may never have been a substantial building here at all, only fields worked on behalf of a community based elsewhere. Archaeological testing and monitoring carried out in 2011 by Ó Drisceoil found no material to confirm or complicate the picture, leaving the site in the same ambiguous condition the map-makers recorded nearly two centuries ago: a name, a category, and a question mark.

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Pete F
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