Church, Ballyhenry, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
At the western edge of a graveyard in Ballyhenry, two low stony banks, each barely half a metre high and running only five metres before meeting at a right angle, are all that physically remains of a church.
The building they once belonged to has otherwise vanished entirely, absorbed back into the slope of the hillside overlooking the stream below. What survives is less a ruin than an outline, a faint NW corner pressed into the turf, easily mistaken for a field boundary by anyone not looking carefully.
The graveyard itself is a tidy quadrangular enclosure, roughly 52 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, bounded by a stone wall. A plaque beside the gate records that the wall was erected in 1845 at the desire and expense of a Robert Truell Esq., lending the site one of its few firm historical anchors. The formality of that Victorian intervention, a named patron, a dated inscription, sits in quiet contrast with the older and more ambiguous archaeology nearby. On the western side, a curving earthen bank about a metre high extends for some 20 metres, and this arc is thought to indicate the outline of an original oval enclosure considerably larger than the present rectangular one, perhaps around 70 metres east to west. Oval or sub-circular enclosures of this kind are commonly associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where the boundary, known as a vallum, defined sacred space long before stone walls replaced it.
