site of Church, Killurin, Co. Wexford

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site of Church, Killurin, Co. Wexford

On an east-facing slope above the River Slaney in County Wexford, a rectangular graveyard marks the spot where a parish church once stood.

The church itself is long gone, cleared away around 1800 to make way for a new Church of Ireland building nearby, and the only physical trace of anything older is a single eroded fragment of Dundry stone, a pale oolitic limestone quarried near Bristol that was commonly imported into Ireland during the medieval period, carved into two attached columns and standing just 17 centimetres high. It is a modest remnant for what was once a functioning parish church.

The documentary record, though thin, opens a small window onto the site's history. A visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, noted that the church at Killurin was impropriate to Henry Wallop, meaning its tithes and revenues had been granted to a layman rather than to the church itself, a common arrangement following the Tudor reformations. Whether there was even a priest serving the parish at that point, the visitation does not say. By the time the antiquarian John O'Donovan was writing around 1840, the old building had already been demolished for roughly four decades, its stones presumably absorbed into the fabric of the new church. Archaeological testing carried out just north of the graveyard in 1998 produced no features of interest, leaving the buried history of the site effectively unreadable.

The graveyard, roughly 50 to 70 metres north to south and about 40 metres east to west, is defined by an earthen bank with stone facing on three sides and a masonry wall to the north. About 350 metres to the south lies St Laurence's Well, a holy well that shares the general landscape with the church site and suggests a longer continuity of use in this part of the Slaney valley than the surviving physical evidence alone would indicate.

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