Burial ground, Ballybeg, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Ballybeg, Co. Wexford

At the north-west angle of a crossroads known as the Bull Ring, where the road between Carnew and Ferns meets a minor east-west lane in County Wexford, a subrectangular patch of grass sits on a south-facing slope with no headstones, no grave mounds, and no official designation to mark it as a burial ground at all.

The ground is uneven underfoot, and a commemorative cross erected in 2002 is the only structure that acknowledges what local tradition has long maintained: that people are buried here, including victims of the Great Famine and the dead of a battle fought less than two kilometres away.

The battle in question was Kilthomas, fought on 27th May 1798 during the United Irish rebellion, when insurgent forces clashed with Crown troops in the surrounding countryside. Local memory holds that rebel dead from that engagement were brought to this spot. The site also carries associations with Famine burials, a practice that was common across Ireland in the 1840s when churchyard space, social stigma, and sheer numbers of dead left many victims interred in marginal ground outside consecrated land. The plot itself, roughly 15 metres by 12 metres, is defined by two low earthen banks running north to south, each no more than half a metre high. Nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps from both 1839 and 1902 depict the area as a small copse, suggesting the ground was wooded within living memory of those surveys. There are no grave markers visible, though the irregular surface hints at disturbance beneath.

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