Church, Ballingly, Co. Wexford
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Churches & Chapels
The most telling detail about the ruined parish church at Ballingly may be this: when the scholar John O'Donovan visited around 1840, he could find almost no graves.
For a parish church enclosed within field banks above the Corock River in County Wexford, the near-absence of burials is quietly unsettling, suggesting a community that had long since stopped gathering here. The enclosure itself, roughly 45 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, sits on a slight bluff above the valley floor, with an arm of the meandering river about 80 metres to the west.
The church's history of abandonment stretches back at least to 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, recorded during a visitation that the building had no priest and no chancel. What survives of the fabric tells its own fragmented story. As of 1988, the west gable remained more or less intact, carrying a double bellcote and a lancet window, the tall, narrow window form associated with medieval ecclesiastical building. The north wall alongside it still stood to around 3 metres, preserving a round-headed doorway framed in green stone. The remaining walls had crumbled to roughly 1.5 metres or less, their gaps likely marking where windows or other openings once were. On the south wall, a blocked doorway, described by O'Donovan as pointed, has a holy water stoup carved with a face on its eastern side. At the east end, a stone altar survives, and laid across it is a large granite slab with chamfered edges on its underside; the chamfering suggests it may originally have been a grave-slab, set upside down at some point and repurposed. A piscina fragment, a small basin once used for disposing of water used in the Mass, and the base of a finial cross also remain within the walls. The west gable, which had stood for so long as the church's most complete feature, fell in the late 1990s and has since been cleared away. About 100 metres to the north lies the site of Lady's Well, a holy well whose proximity to the church suggests a landscape of devotion that once extended well beyond the enclosure walls.