Grave Yard, Beggerin Island, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Beggerin Island, Co. Wexford

What is now a low, unremarkable field on the reclaimed sloblands north of Wexford Harbour was, until the mid-nineteenth century, a tidal island.

Begerin, roughly 450 metres long and no more than 200 metres wide at its broadest, sat surrounded by the shifting waters of the north slob, and at its north-eastern corner an oval raised graveyard and church occupied ground that generations of the faithful had treated as sacred and separate from the ordinary world. The raising of land through reclamation work in the mid-1800s quietly erased the island's identity, absorbing it into the drained agricultural plain that now extends across much of the harbour's northern margins. The graveyard itself, defined by old field banks, still measures roughly 83 metres on its longest axis, its oval shape a form commonly associated with early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where the boundary of the sacred precinct was drawn in a curve rather than the straight lines of later, more formal layouts.

The site preserves fragments of its early Christian past in unequal ways. A cross-inscribed stone remains towards the eastern edge of the graveyard, a simple carved marker of the kind that once served as a focus for prayer or as a boundary indicator within a monastic or ecclesiastical landscape. Two cross-slabs, flat stones bearing incised or carved crosses that were a common form of early medieval commemoration and devotion, have long since been removed for safekeeping: one is held by the National Museum of Ireland, and the other is at the Wexford County Museum in Enniscorthy. Their absence from the site is a reminder of how often the most portable pieces of Ireland's early Christian material culture have migrated to institutional collections, leaving the places that produced them looking emptier than their history warrants.

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