Grave Yard, Inch, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Grounds
The name is the first clue that something older lies beneath.
Inismocholmoc, meaning roughly 'Colman's Island', suggests a place once surrounded or at least defined by water, yet the graveyard that preserves this ancient dedication sits quietly in a low-lying river valley in County Wexford, with the Inch River running some sixty metres to the south. There is nothing to see at ground level of whatever church or early Christian foundation once occupied the site. The irregularly shaped enclosure, roughly eighty metres east to west and between thirty and forty metres north to south, is the only surviving hint that something more organised once stood here.
The 'island' of the name would likely have referred to a patch of raised or drier ground within a marshy, flood-prone landscape, a common setting for early monastic foundations in Ireland. Such sites were often chosen for their natural separation from the surrounding terrain, providing a degree of seclusion without requiring elaborate construction. The dedication to a figure called Colman is similarly characteristic: there are numerous early Irish saints of that name, and many small, localised foundations across the country carry versions of this dedication without a clear record of which Colman was intended. What remains at Inch is the graveyard itself, still in use or at least still present, holding the outline of an enclosure whose origins reach back to a period when the church it contained was a functioning part of the early Irish ecclesiastical landscape.