Church, Ballyregan, Co. Wexford

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Church, Ballyregan, Co. Wexford

On the southern slope of Carrigroe Hill in County Wexford, there is a place that barely registered even when it was first recorded.

A small circular earthwork, around twenty metres across, sits within a triangular enclosure measuring roughly fifty-five metres at its longest. By the time anyone thought to write it down, it had already slipped from living memory.

The site appears on only one map, the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch series, where it is marked as a graveyard. A year or so later, the scholar and placename collector John O'Donovan noted that it was known as Teampall Cille Brighde, meaning the church of the parish of Kilbride, a dedication to Saint Brigid. O'Donovan recorded it as almost forgotten even then, which makes its survival as a named place all the more remarkable. The identification matters because Kilbride parish has no other known ecclesiastical site within its boundaries, making this modest earthwork the most likely location of its original parish church. The circular form of the inner feature is consistent with early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures, where a roughly circular boundary, sometimes a raised bank or ditch, marked out consecrated ground. A small stream runs about seventy metres to the south, a detail worth noting given how frequently early church sites were established close to water.

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