Site of Church, Rathaspick, Co. Wexford

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Site of Church, Rathaspick, Co. Wexford

The Church of Ireland building that stands in Rathaspick today gives little away about what preceded it.

When the present church was constructed in the 1820s, the remains of the medieval parish church were cleared away entirely, leaving a walled rectangular graveyard with no visible trace of the older structure, save for a granite font and its base. The graveyard, sitting on a slight rise in an otherwise low-lying stretch of County Wexford, holds its history quietly.

The parish church at Rathaspick has documented references reaching back to the late fourteenth century, and by the seventeenth century its story becomes more particular. A visitation in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, recorded that the priest was one Michael Bellarby and that the church and its chancel were still in reasonable repair. Within a few decades that had changed: the Down Survey of 1655 to 1658, a large-scale mapping project commissioned under Cromwell to record landholdings across Ireland, noted in its accompanying terrier, or written commentary, that the building was already ruinous. A writer named Synnott, recording local detail around 1680, noted that the church had been dedicated to St Bridget. That dedication is echoed nearby in the name of St Bridget's Well, also known as the Dutchman's Well, located roughly 250 metres to the north-east of the site. The most remarkable survival from the medieval church is not the granite font that remains in the graveyard but a second font, made of Dundry stone, a limestone quarried near Bristol that was widely exported to Ireland during the medieval period. This font is rectangular, carved with foliage beneath the basin, and joins by a moulding to a cylindrical stem that narrows at its base. The scalloped decoration points to Romanesque influences and a late twelfth-century date. For a time it stood outside the doorway of the present church, but in July 2018 it was moved to the Irish Agricultural Museum at Johnstown Castle, approximately one kilometre to the south-south-west, where it is kept for safe-keeping.

Visitors to Johnstown Castle, which houses the Irish Agricultural Museum, will find the Dundry stone font there rather than at the graveyard site itself. The medieval granite font and base remain in the graveyard at Rathaspick, and St Bridget's Well lies a short distance to the north-east for those inclined to trace the older devotional landscape of the parish.

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