Nunnery (in ruins), Taghmon, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Religious Houses

Nunnery (in ruins), Taghmon, Co. Wexford

On the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small rectangular structure on a gentle south-facing slope near Taghmon in County Wexford is marked, plainly and without elaboration, as a "Nunnery (in ruins)".

By the time the cartographers recorded it, very little remained above ground. By 1988, fieldwork could identify only the faint outline of a larger rectangular form, roughly 18.5 metres east to west and 12.8 metres north to south, defined by low earthen banks no more than 0.8 metres high, with what appeared to be an entrance gap on the southern side. A possible trackway, some 70 metres long, ran east to west about 30 metres to the south. The Nunnery Well lies roughly 75 metres to the southeast. It is a site that survives more as a shape in the ground than as anything that announces itself.

What the place actually was is genuinely uncertain. One possibility is that it began as a pre-Anglo-Norman nunnery, which was later brought under the Arroasian rule, a reform movement of Augustinian canons and canonesses that spread through Ireland during the twelfth century, before falling derelict by around 1330. A second possibility is that the same ground later served as St Bridget's church, a building recorded in 1543, 1558, and 1615 among the possessions of the Knights Hospitallers of Kilcolgan, a military-religious order that held various ecclesiastical properties in the region. When Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a visitation in 1615, he found no priest attached to the church, and the state of the building itself went unrecorded, which suggests it was already in poor repair or simply not worth noting. Archaeological testing in the vicinity in 1998 failed to recover any material that might resolve the question one way or the other, leaving both identities, the Arroasian nunnery and the Hospitaller church, as competing explanations for the same quietly ambiguous scrap of Wexford ground.

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