Church (in ruins), Kilmacree, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Kilmacree, Co. Wexford

One of the more quietly telling details about the ruined parish church at Kilmacree is that its baptismal font is no longer there.

The rectangular granite font, cut to receive water in a basin roughly forty centimetres square, was moved at some point to the remains of a Roman Catholic church at Ballykelly, about six hundred metres to the north. The migration of a font between two ruins, neither of them in use, gives a particular texture to the landscape here, one where the objects of religious practice have outlasted the institutions that held them.

The church itself sits on level ground off a minor cul-de-sac road in County Wexford, enclosed within a subrectangular graveyard bounded by earthen banks and hedges. Its recorded history begins in 1541, when it was attached to St. Selskar's Abbey in Wexford town, an Augustinian house with considerable property across the county. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation of churches in his diocese, Kilmacree had passed into the hands of Henry Wallop through a process known as impropriation, whereby the revenues and oversight of a parish church were assigned to a lay person rather than a clergyman. Ram's record notes neither the name of any priest serving the parish nor the physical condition of the building at that time, which suggests either that both were unremarkable or that neither was particularly encouraging.

What survives today is a nave and chancel, their grass-covered walls reduced to low courses of stone between roughly eighty centimetres and one and a half metres thick. The most complete feature remaining is the pointed chancel arch, the narrow opening that once separated the congregational space from the liturgical east end, its piers built from dressed limestone. The arch stands just under two metres high and less than one and a half metres wide, a modest but intact frame still dividing the interior of a building that no longer has a roof or a purpose beyond marking where one once stood.

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