Church (in ruins), Aglish, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Churches & Chapels

Church (in ruins), Aglish, Co. Waterford

The name tells you something is off before you even see the ruins. Aglish comes from the Irish "eaglais", meaning church, but this particular site carries the fuller designation Aglish na nGall, the foreigners' church, a name that appears in ecclesiastical taxation records as early as 1302 under the latinised form Gallis. Who exactly the foreigners were, and what set this congregation apart from its neighbours, has not been resolved, but the label alone suggests this low-lying patch of Waterford was once a place of some social or ecclesiastical complexity.

What remains of the church itself is mostly the east gable, standing at 3.5 metres, with short runs of the north and south walls extending from it. The east window retains its dressed sandstone surrounds and two round-headed lights set within a generous embrasure, though the central mullion between the lights is gone and ivy has long since blocked the opening. Inside the gable at the north end, a small shelf survives where a statue once stood. The graveyard enclosing the site is subrectangular, roughly 55 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, bounded by a stone-faced earthen bank on the east side and masonry walls elsewhere. Among the objects documented by the Waterford antiquary Reverend Patrick Power in 1938, a small cross and a seventeenth-century graveslab have since disappeared. Three crudely decorated eighteenth-century headstones he also noted remain near the southern perimeter. An object Power described as an octagonal stoup or font turned out to be something else entirely: the base of a wayside cross stem with pyramidal stops, now positioned just inside the northern entrance to the graveyard. Archaeological testing carried out in 2005 across a substantial area to the north and northwest found nothing connected to the church, though prehistoric material came to light about 150 metres to the southwest, suggesting the wider landscape had a long life before any Christian community settled here.

Rated 0 out of 5

Visitor Notes

Review type for post source and places source type not found
Added by
Picture of Pete F
Pete F
IrishHistory.com is passionate about helping people discover and connect with the rich stories of their local communities.
Please use the form below to submit any photos you may have of Church (in ruins), Aglish, Co. Waterford. We're happy to take any suggested edits you may have too. Please be advised it will take us some time to get to these submissions. Thank you.
Name
Email
Message
Upload images/documents
Maximum file size: 100 MB
If you'd like to add an image or a PDF please do it here.

Advertisement