Site of Saint Leonard's Church, Saintleonards, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Site of Saint Leonard’s Church, Saintleonards, Co. Wexford

What survives here is almost nothing, which is precisely what makes it interesting.

On a slight south-facing slope beside the R733 between Wexford town and Duncannon, a triangular patch of overgrown ground encloses what was once a chapel and its graveyard. No walls stand. No headstones remain. What you find instead is an earthen bank to the north-east, a stone wall to the west, and a sunken wet area edged with a low stone footing roughly 22 metres long. The 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still shows the ghost of a rectangular structure, approximately 20 metres east to west and 15 metres north to south, set within a subrectangular graveyard enclosure. By the time anyone came to measure what remained on the ground, there were no recognisable foundations and no evidence of burial in the interior.

The story behind the site reaches back to 1207, when this land formed part of the original grant to the Cistercian abbey at Tintern, a daughter house of Tintern Abbey in Wales founded that year by William Marshal. The locality of Saintleonards fell within the abbey's parish of Tintern, and the church here most likely served as a chapel-of-ease, a secondary place of worship built to spare parishioners a long journey to the main church, probably attached to a grange or outfarm working the abbey's agricultural lands. The earliest written reference to it comes from 1552, by which point it is recorded simply as a chapel, already suggesting a modest and perhaps diminishing role. A holy well known as Toberernan lies approximately 320 metres to the south-south-east, a reminder that this quietly overlooked corner of County Wexford held a small but layered religious geography during the medieval period.

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