Church, Tomhaggard, Co. Wexford

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Tomhaggard, Co. Wexford

Attached to the northeastern corner of the graveyard at Tomhaggard is a small enclosure defined by earthen banks and hedges rather than the masonry walls that bound the main burial ground.

This annexe serves a specific and quietly sobering purpose: it is where the unidentified drowned, recovered from the nearby sea, have been laid to rest. It is an arrangement that speaks to the realities of a coastal community, and to the long tradition of finding a place within consecrated ground for those whose names the sea did not return.

The place itself reaches back further than that practice. The name Tomhaggard most likely derives from Tuaim Mosacra, meaning the tomb of St. Moshagra of Saggart, an obscure early saint connected with Glendalough whose feast day on 3 March was once observed here. References to a church on the site date from the early thirteenth century and probably earlier. Around 1180, Hervey de Montmorency granted the church, along with others, to Christchurch in Canterbury. Disputes over ecclesiastical rights dragged on for decades: in 1245 Canterbury assigned its interests to Tintern Abbey in County Wexford, but by 1255, unable to reach agreement, Canterbury instead granted Tomhaggard to Geoffrey St. John, later Bishop of Ferns, whose family were probably already in possession. The roofless nave and chancel church that survives today retains ivy-covered walls standing to around 2.7 metres, a fine three-light cusped ogee-headed tracery window in the east gable, and a decorated shallow tomb-niche at the east end of the north wall that would have functioned as an Easter Sepulchre, a recess used during Holy Week liturgy to symbolically house the reserved sacrament. Corbels in both the north and south walls mark where a rood screen once divided the nave from the chancel. The west wall carries a slender ogee-headed window with glazing grooves still visible in the embrasure, and a double bellcote at the apex of the gable. By 1615, when the Protestant bishop Thomas Ram conducted a visitation, William Roche was rector and Jacob Stafford the vicar, and the church and chancel were recorded as being in repair.

Archaeological work in the field immediately north of the graveyard revealed something less visible but equally significant: a series of curving ditches concentric with the church, producing medieval pottery. These multi-vallate enclosures, meaning a sequence of multiple ditches arranged around a central point, are characteristic of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, and suggest the settlement here was considerably more organised and extensive than the surviving ruins alone would indicate. Two holy wells, dedicated to St. Anne and St. James, lie within about 110 metres to the southwest, along with the remains of a mass-house and a tower house, clustering the evidence of several centuries of religious and secular life into a compact and unassuming corner of south Wexford.

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