Church, Glebe, Co. Wexford
Tucked into the southern angle of a small triangular graveyard in County Wexford, there is a standing stone that most visitors to this Church of Ireland site almost certainly walk past without a second glance.
It is modest by any measure, roughly a metre tall with a triangular profile, and it sits within a graveyard whose shape is itself quietly unusual, a roughly triangular plot with masonry walls closing to a point at the south. The church beside it, built in 1824, replaced an older structure of which nothing now remains above ground. What survives instead is this small, weathered upright stone, sharing a churchyard with a nineteenth-century Protestant church, its origins and purpose unrecorded.
The parish here is Monamolin, and the site has been in continuous ecclesiastical use for centuries. When Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation in 1615, he recorded that Daniel Morfi was serving as curate of Mulmolinge, as the parish was then known, and that both the church and its chancel were in good repair. That earlier building was the one the antiquarian John O'Donovan referred to around 1840 when he noted that the 1824 church had been raised on older foundations. Nothing of that pre-1824 fabric is visible today. The site sits towards the bottom of a south-facing slope, and the graveyard, around ninety metres east to west and forty-five metres north to south, holds several layers of history that the landscape only partly discloses.
About 370 metres to the south-southwest lies St Moling's Well, a circular structure built in drystone, roofed with lintels in the traditional manner of holy wells across Ireland. These wells were typically sites of patterns, the local Catholic devotional gatherings that combined prayer with communal assembly, often held on a saint's feast day. Here the pattern fell on the 17th of June. The saint in question, St Moling, was an early medieval bishop associated with the region, and his name surfaces across the local landscape in both the well and the older form of the parish name. The standing stone in the graveyard, the triangular plot, the layered church foundations, and the nearby well together make this a site where several centuries of religious use quietly overlap.
