Church, Bolgerstown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Bolgerstown, Co. Wexford

On the northern edge of a plateau in Bolgerstown, County Wexford, sits an enclosure that two successive editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1839 and 1941, both labelled as a graveyard.

The oddity is that there are no headstones here, no grave markers of any kind, and no visible entrance through which a mourner, or indeed anyone else, might ever have passed. What remains is a roughly D-shaped area of overgrown ground, measuring approximately 47 metres north to south and 43 metres east to west, bounded on the west by a straight field bank and on the south-east by a scarp and fosse. A fosse is simply a ditch, and this one is around three metres wide with an internal depth of about 1.4 metres, giving the enclosure a distinctly deliberate, if now thoroughly obscured, boundary.

Within the enclosure, the fragmentary remains of a small structure survive, its exterior measuring roughly 9.8 metres east to west and 5.4 metres north to south. The walls, bonded in clay rather than mortar, still stand to an external height of around 0.8 metres and are approximately 0.75 metres thick. The interior of the structure has been dug out to a depth of 1.4 metres, which may indicate later disturbance or robbing of material, though the record offers no explanation. Clay-bonded construction is a technique common in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical and vernacular buildings, and the D-shaped enclosure form is similarly associated with early church sites across Ireland, where a curving boundary often demarcated sacred ground. The absence of any burial evidence is genuinely puzzling given the cartographic tradition of calling this a graveyard, and it raises the question of whether the OS surveyors were recording a local memory of the site's function rather than anything visible on the ground at the time.

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