Church, Harristown Big, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Harristown Big, Co. Wexford

At a bend in the Corrock river in County Wexford, where the water changes course from a southeast-northwest run to east-west, local tradition holds that a church once stood.

There is no surviving masonry, no graveyard, no dedication recorded. The site sits at the southern edge of a relatively flat stretch of land, looking out over the steep-sided ravine the river has cut below. It is the kind of place where memory of something sacred has outlasted any physical evidence of what that thing actually was.

The difficulty is that the ground itself offers no confirmation. Around 1985 the site was quarried, an intervention that might have been expected to throw up stonework, dressed blocks, or at minimum human bone if a church and its burial ground had ever occupied the spot. Nothing was reported. A separate programme of archaeological testing carried out around 2009, covering a large triangular area roughly a hundred metres to the northeast and measuring approximately 240 metres north to south and 270 metres east to west along its northern edge, likewise produced no archaeological material or features of any kind. The quarrying continues; the site remains active. What persists is only the local tradition itself, stubborn in the absence of anything to support or contradict it.

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