Church (in ruins), Askinvillar, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

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Church (in ruins), Askinvillar, Co. Wexford

On a gentle east-facing slope at the foot of the Blackstairs Mountains, a small walled graveyard preserves two granite crosses that have outlasted almost everything else around them.

The church they once accompanied has gone, the holy well nearby has gone, and even a bullaun stone, a shallow basin-shaped depression cut into rock and associated with early Christian sites, that was once recorded close to the well no longer survives. What remains is a site whose scale and shape have become visible only at certain moments, when a ploughed field reveals a broad arc of subsoil marking the perimeter of what was once a much larger enclosure, roughly seventy metres across.

The saint associated with this place is not known, which is itself a small puzzle given how thoroughly the early Irish church mapped its holy figures onto the landscape. John O'Donovan, writing around 1840, recorded a fragment of church wall and a nearby well known as St Doran's Well, but both had already disappeared by the time twentieth-century writers came looking. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows a circular enclosure of around forty metres diameter with a church building inside it, suggesting the site had already contracted considerably from its original extent. The two granite crosses that survive within the small masonry-walled graveyard, which measures roughly twelve by eleven metres and may now serve as a family burial plot, offer the clearest physical evidence of the site's age. One bears an incised cross on one face and a raised boss on the other; the second has an elaborately incised cross on one side and a tenon at its base, the projecting peg by which a standing stone cross would have been set into a socket or base stone. Neither is large, but both carry the quiet assurance of objects made to last.

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