Church (in ruins), Kinnagh, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
The east wall of the old parish church at Kinnagh still stands to a height of four metres, a reasonable remnant given that everything else has largely dissolved back into the ground.
The window that once pierced that wall is gone, robbed out at some point, leaving a blank face of stone rising above the overgrown foundation courses and scattered rubble that mark where the nave and chancel once were. It is the kind of ruin that asks you to do some imaginative work.
The church itself was a modest building, as many medieval parish churches in rural Ireland were. The nave measured roughly twelve and a half metres long internally, with a chancel of just under five metres appended to the east end, giving a total external footprint of about nineteen and a half metres east to west by eight metres north to south. It sits within a subrectangular graveyard defined by a stone-faced earthen bank and hedge, the whole enclosure running to roughly forty-eight metres along its longer axis. The western wall survives to just over a metre, with no readable features remaining. What the church looked like in use, when it was built, or precisely when it fell out of use are questions the stonework no longer answers.
About five hundred and fifty metres to the east-south-east lies St Martin's Well, which still draws visitors. Holy wells dedicated to saints were, and in many parts of Ireland remain, sites of quiet local devotion, visited on particular feast days or in connection with ailments and petitions. The proximity of a functioning well to a ruined church is not unusual in the Irish landscape; the two often formed complementary focal points for a community's religious life. Here, one has persisted and the other has not.