Ecclesiastical site, Clonamona, Co. Wexford

Clonamona is derived from the Irish Cluain na Manach, meaning the meadow of the monks, and the name was already in recorded use by 1594. That linguistic trace may be the most concrete evidence that anyone was ever here at all.

The site appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked as a monastery on the basis of local tradition alone. No structural remains have been identified, no documentary record of a foundation survives, and the nature of any community that may have gathered here is entirely unknown. What does exist is a small well, roughly 1.4 metres in diameter, enclosed by drystone walling about 1.2 metres high, sitting in an overgrown area of the townland near the River Lask. Drystone construction uses stones laid without mortar, relying on weight and careful placement for stability. Holy wells across Ireland were frequently associated with early ecclesiastical sites, and the presence of one here might seem suggestive; however, there is no evidence that this particular well was ever venerated or used for religious purposes. It may simply be a field well, ordinary and functional, that has outlasted whatever else was once nearby.

What remains, then, is essentially a gap: a name that insists something happened here, a cartographic note made four centuries after that name was first written down, and a well in the undergrowth that declines to confirm anything. The slope faces east toward the Lask, the meadow is still a meadow, and the monks, if monks there were, have left no further account of themselves.