Church, Ballymore, Co. Wexford

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Church, Ballymore, Co. Wexford

A raised rectangular graveyard on the western edge of a low ridge in County Wexford marks the site of a parish church that has entirely vanished.

By around 1840, when the scholar John O'Donovan visited and recorded the place, there was no trace of the building left at ground level. What remains is the earthwork of the graveyard itself, measuring roughly 39 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, and a single ambiguous stone, an oval piece with an oval socket, almost buried in the northeast corner. It is generally described as a font, though it may equally be the base of a cross. Its function, like much else here, is genuinely uncertain.

The place is known as Screen, from the Irish scrín, meaning a shrine, which hints at an early ecclesiastical significance. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a formal visitation, the church was recorded as impropriate to Henry Wallop, meaning that the revenues from the parish had been granted to a lay landowner rather than being administered by the church itself, a common arrangement in post-Reformation Ireland. No priest was named and the physical condition of the building went unrecorded, suggesting it may already have been in poor shape. About 100 metres to the west of the graveyard, a natural spring was the site of patterns until around 1820. Patterns were traditional gatherings held on a saint's feast day, combining prayer, socialising, and occasionally music and games; at Screen, the pattern day was the 27th of September. Archaeological work in the field immediately west of the graveyard has added further texture. A geophysical survey tentatively identified two possible ditches and a number of pits, and subsequent testing recovered pottery and other material pointing to high medieval activity. Among the finds was a late fifteenth-century Geraldine groat, a coin associated with the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare, which suggests the site saw use well into the later medieval period.

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