Church (in ruins), Seanchluain, Co. Waterford

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Church (in ruins), Seanchluain, Co. Waterford

What survives of the old parish church of Ringagoragh at Seanchluain amounts to little more than a pointed arch and a fragment of wall, yet those two elements preserve enough detail to suggest what the building once was. The pointed chancel arch, just under two metres wide, separates what would have been the nave from the chancel in a nave-and-chancel church, the standard layout of a medieval Irish parish building. High on each pier of the arch, a pair of opposing rectangular holes, roughly fourteen by thirteen centimetres, almost certainly held the beam of a rood screen, the timber or stone partition that divided the congregation's space from the priest's. It is a quiet but specific detail, the kind that rewards a close look at what might otherwise seem like a bare ruin. The surviving section of the south nave wall contains a round-headed sandstone window set into a lintelled embrasure with dressed stone ingoings, narrow and carefully made, only about seventeen centimetres wide.

The Reverend Patrick Power documented the ancient ruined churches of County Waterford in 1898, and this site was among those he recorded. The church sits towards the bottom of a north-facing slope within a rectangular graveyard bounded by masonry walls, though the burial ground has been extended considerably to the west and south over time. Close by, roughly seventy metres to the north-east, lies the site of St Nicholas' Well, where patterns, the traditional Irish practice of visiting a holy well on a saint's feast day to pray and sometimes to walk a prescribed circuit, were held on the 6th of December each year until around 1830. That date, the feast of St Nicholas, points to a dedication that gives the well and perhaps the wider ecclesiastical site a particular identity. An earthwork site lies about a hundred and thirty metres to the north, suggesting the church did not stand in isolation but was part of a broader landscape of activity. Archaeological testing carried out in 2005 over a large area immediately south of the graveyard produced no related material, which means the ground in that direction has so far kept its own counsel.

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