Church (in ruins), Artramon, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
In the graveyard at Artramon, among the grass and the headstones, there sits a small rounded granite stone barely the size of a serving dish.
Its surface is covered in cup-marks, shallow circular depressions pecked into the rock in prehistory, and it was only identified in 2018 by Michael Fortune. That a stone carrying some of the oldest forms of human mark-making in Ireland should turn up quietly in a post-medieval churchyard, unremarked for so long, says something about the layered, unhurried strangeness of this particular site.
The ruined church occupies a small rectangular graveyard defined by earthen banks, itself set within what appears to be a much older D-shaped ecclesiastical enclosure, roughly 130 metres north to south and 120 metres east to west, its western edge cut through by a lane. This kind of curvilinear or sub-circular enclosure is a familiar feature of early Irish Christianity, suggesting a sacred boundary that predates the standing medieval structure by centuries. Of the nave and chancel church that once stood here, only the chancel survives in any meaningful way; the nave has been reduced to foundations. The north wall of the chancel still reaches a height of around five metres, ivy-covered, with two small windows set high up, and the adjacent east wall retains two niches stacked one above the other. A visitation conducted in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, recorded that one Richard Devereoux was then rector of Ardcroman and Richard Hore the curate. The church was judged to be in reasonable condition at that point, though the chancel, the very part that survives, was already in need of repair. The Down Survey maps of 1656 to 1658 also record the parish, offering a seventeenth-century snapshot of the landscape before the building fell fully into ruin.
The site sits on a gentle south-facing slope, and within roughly 120 to 170 metres to the south-south-west lie two further points of interest: St Bridget's Well, an oval drystone-walled holy well that remains in active veneration, and a tower house. The proximity of a venerated well, a church, a probable early enclosure, and a reused prehistoric stone within the same small compass gives Artramon a density of occupation across time that rewards slow looking rather than a quick pass.