Church, Ballybrazil, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Ballybrazil, Co. Wexford

At the foot of a south-facing slope on Slievecoiltia Hill in County Wexford, where the ground softens into the headwaters of a small stream, a church has almost entirely returned to the earth.

The walls that remain are barely walls at all: grass-covered foundations, no more than 0.9 metres wide and at most 0.7 metres high, tracing out the footprint of a nave roughly 14 metres long and a smaller chancel attached to its east end. A nave-and-chancel plan, in which a rectangular congregational space connects to a narrower sanctuary, is among the most common forms in Irish ecclesiastical architecture from the early medieval period onward, and the modest scale here suggests a modest, perhaps very old, rural foundation.

The church sits in the north-western corner of a subrectangular graveyard, which is itself enclosed within a much larger outer enclosure spanning roughly 94 metres east to west and 86 metres north to south. That outer boundary is marked by slight traces of a fosse, a wide defensive or enclosing ditch running around the northern and eastern sides, and a scarp to the south-east. Ecclesiastical sites with layered enclosures of this kind are often associated with early Irish monasticism, where an inner sacred zone and an outer precinct served distinct functions. Adding to the sense of accumulated sacred geography, Crone Well, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the antiquarian John O'Donovan writing around 1840, lies just outside the enclosure to the south-west. A holy well traditionally associated with St. Bridget sits approximately 580 metres to the south-east. The clustering of a well dedicated to Mary, another to Bridget, and an early church foundation in such close proximity points to a place that held considerable local religious significance across many centuries, even as the structures themselves have all but disappeared into the hillside.

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