Catholic Church, Ballykelly, Co. Wexford

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Catholic Church, Ballykelly, Co. Wexford

Along a minor road in County Wexford, the north wall of an early nineteenth-century Catholic church has been absorbed into a handball alley.

That is not a metaphor for anything; it is simply what happened. The wall survives at around 1.2 metres in height, a pointed doorway in red brick punched through it to connect the two structures, while the rest of the church's rectangular shell stands reduced, its walls worn down to little more than footings.

The church was built in 1797 on land donated by a man named Jacob Poole, and it served the local community under the name Kilmacree for just over sixty years before closing in 1858. The building measured roughly seventeen metres east to west and seven metres north to south, modest by any standard. Two memorials set into the outer face of the north wall date from 1798 and 1824, the earlier one placed within a year of the church's opening and during one of the most turbulent periods in Irish history, the year of the United Irishmen's rebellion. The memorials survive in situ, pressed against masonry that now partly belongs to a sports court. There is also a granite baptismal font on the site, a rectangular basin measuring around 64 by 60 centimetres externally and roughly 30 centimetres deep, which did not originate here at all. It was brought from an older Kilmacree church located approximately 600 metres to the south, effectively making this ruin a repository for the material remains of two distinct places of worship that once served the same community.

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