Kiltennel Church (in ruins), Kiltennell, Co. Wexford

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Kiltennel Church (in ruins), Kiltennell, Co. Wexford

The graveyard at Kiltennel is shaped like the letter D, and the straight edge is not a wall but a natural scarp, the ground simply dropping away towards a stream some sixty metres to the north.

It is a quietly odd piece of geometry, the kind of thing you notice only once you start wondering why a burial ground would have one perfectly linear side. The ruined church sits within this enclosure, close to the sea shore to the south, its two long walls of mortared shale still standing to a maximum height of two metres, though the east end has largely collapsed.

The church was dedicated to St. Sinchael, an otherwise obscure early Irish saint, as recorded by the scholar John O'Donovan around 1840. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation of his diocese, the building was still functioning: Matheus Lee held the position of rector and Murtagh Mc Parson served as curate, and Ram noted that both the church and its chancel were in a reasonable state of repair. What survives today is the shell of a single-cell structure, meaning a plain rectangular nave without later additions or transepts, measuring roughly fifteen metres in length internally and five and a half metres across. The south wall retains a narrow entrance, less than a metre wide, set towards its western end. There are no decorative features visible in the remaining masonry. Inside the roofless shell, several eighteenth-century grave markers have been placed, suggesting the building continued to serve the community in some capacity even after it fell out of use as a functioning church.

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