Church, Wexford, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
There is a church in Wexford town that has never appeared on a map.
Not lost through neglect or disaster in any documented sense, simply never recorded cartographically, despite being mentioned in official surveys and episcopal visitations. The parish it served was claimed to be the smallest in the town, perhaps the smallest in the country, covering just over one hectare at the southernmost edge of the settlement. Its name, St Doologe's, is itself a small linguistic puzzle: a corruption of St Olave's, the Scandinavian martyr-king whose name was carried into Irish port towns by Norse settlers and traders during the medieval period.
The paper trail for the church is thin but specific. In 1615, Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation during which he noted that one David Browne served as curate of the church, then recorded under the variant spelling St Towlocks, and that both the church and its chancel were in a reasonable state of repair. The church surfaces again in a survey of 1662, confirming it was still a functioning presence in the town at that point. Beyond those two appearances, the record goes quiet. No map has ever placed it with certainty, though it is thought to have stood somewhere near the junction of Lower King Street and Barrack Street, in the southern reaches of the old town.