Chapel, Ballytory, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
In a field in County Wexford, a rough rectangle of grass and scrub, roughly fifteen metres by ten, sits deliberately untouched on a gentle south-facing slope.
The surrounding land has been reclaimed and worked, but this small patch has been left alone, and the reason for that became clear in the 1970s when an attempt to bring it into agricultural use turned up evidence of burials. The place is known locally as the Graveyard, and the name has proven accurate.
The site almost certainly marks what remains of a chapel dedicated to All Saints at Ballytory, recorded by a writer named Sinnott around 1680, with his account preserved in later published works by Hore in 1862 and again in 1921. By the time Sinnott was writing, the chapel may already have fallen out of use; the period following the Reformation saw many smaller rural chapels and their associated burial grounds quietly abandoned, their physical fabric gradually dissolving into the surrounding landscape until only a local name and a patch of rough ground preserved the memory. Nothing above ground now marks the building itself, and the rectangular area of undisturbed scrub is all that survives as a visible trace of what was once a functioning place of worship and burial.