Burial Ground, Stagrennan, Co. Meath

The remains, traceable as a rectangular structure roughly nine metres east to west and six metres north to south, sit within a graveyard of about fifty metres by thirty on a gentle north-facing rise, with the River Boyne estuary visible less than half a kilometre away. The east gable still stands, and its pointed window arch survives in outline, though the dressed cut stone has long since been removed and used elsewhere, a common fate for worked stone in rural Ireland once a building fell out of use.

The site was known as Stagrennan of St. James, and at the time of the Dissolution it was recorded as a possession of the Augustinian priory of Llanthony in Gloucestershire, an English monastery with Irish landholdings that were swept up in the suppressions of 1540. A church at Stagrennan still appears on the Down Survey, the great mid-seventeenth-century mapping project that catalogued Irish land ownership before the Cromwellian redistributions, and a contemporary terrier, meaning a written register of land and property, notes simply an old church at Stagrennan. Yet the site is conspicuously absent from the ecclesiastical visitations carried out by Archbishop Ussher in 1622 and Bishop Dopping between 1682 and 1685, neither of whom listed it among the functioning churches of the Duleek deanery. Whether it had already fallen into disuse by then or was simply overlooked is not clear. By 1640, sixty acres at Stagrennan were in the hands of John Bellew of Stammeen, suggesting the land had passed into secular ownership well before anyone thought to record its condition in detail.