Church, Graheeroge, Co. Wexford

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Church, Graheeroge, Co. Wexford

A church that exists mainly as a memory in a field name is an unusual kind of monument.

In Graheeroge, County Wexford, the site of a medieval church survives not as standing walls or even a ruin, but as a faint circular cropmark roughly forty metres in diameter, readable only from the air. The land around it has been ploughed for so long that the archaeology beneath has been almost entirely flattened, and standing in a cereal crop at ground level, there is nothing to see. The place persisted in local knowledge under the name the chapel field, and it was that folk memory, recorded in the Ordnance Survey field memoir of 1940, that kept the site on the map at all. Tiles turned up during ploughing over the years, fragments of a buried building slowly being consumed by agriculture.

The only physical remnant to have been recovered is a roughly worked piece of stone that may be part of a font stem, the upright shaft on which a baptismal basin would have rested. It was removed from the site at some point and moved to a location about 350 metres to the north-north-east, before eventually making its way to Ballinacoola More near Curracloe. Its crude working suggests it may date to the early medieval period, though the identification is tentative. The cropmark itself, the ghostly circle visible on aerial photographs and faintly discernible on satellite imagery as recently as 2010, is the outline left in growing crops by buried stone or disturbed soil beneath the surface, the kind of trace that shows up clearly in dry summers when shallow-rooted plants above buried features struggle more than those in undisturbed ground.

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