Church, Duncormick, Co. Wexford

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Churches & Chapels

Church, Duncormick, Co. Wexford

A rectangular graveyard on the western edge of a plateau in south County Wexford holds the ghost of a parish church that no longer exists above ground.

The church itself was replaced around 1810 by a Church of Ireland building, leaving the older site to be read mainly through what surrounds it: masonry boundary walls, the plateau's quiet elevation above a north-south stream roughly 170 metres to the west, and, crucially, what lies beneath the surrounding fields.

Archaeological testing carried out in 2004 uncovered the trace of a fosse, a defensive or boundary ditch between 2.4 and 3 metres wide, running to the north and east of the graveyard. The full outline it suggests is considerably larger than the graveyard itself, pointing to an ecclesiastical enclosure measuring roughly 120 metres east to west and 65 metres north to south, with the graveyard wall forming part of the southern perimeter and a curving road completing the western edge. Enclosures of this kind are a common feature of early Irish monastic and church sites, and their survival, even as a buried ditch, often indicates that a settlement had deeper roots than its later medieval masonry suggests. A visitation carried out in 1615 by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, named Henry Reigh as curate at Duncormick, though it recorded nothing about the physical state of the church at that point. Around 400 metres to the south, across the stream, lies St Clomaun's Well, where a stone inscribed 'R.C. 1696' was found along with other fragments. A holy well dedicated to a local saint, positioned just beyond the boundary of an older enclosure, is a pairing familiar from early Christian landscapes across Ireland. Closer still, roughly 120 metres to the west, stands a motte and bailey, the earthwork remains of a Norman fortification, placing the church site within a cluster of medieval features that accumulated, layer by layer, around this modest plateau.

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