Church (in ruins), Ardcandrisk, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Ardcandrisk, Co. Wexford

On the 1941 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the ruined church at Ardcandrisk in County Wexford is labelled as a castle.

It is not a castle. That small cartographic error, unremarked for decades, gives a sense of how thoroughly this modest medieval parish church had faded from common knowledge by the mid-twentieth century, its walls low enough and its graveyard neglected enough that even the mapmakers seem to have guessed.

The church sits on a shelf near the eastern end of a low ridge, within a subrectangular graveyard defined by an earthen bank with external stone facing. The parish is thought to have been founded by St. Mo Beoc of Ard Cainross, the place-name element reflecting that early ecclesiastical association. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation of his diocese, the church was still functioning: one Robert Reyner was recorded as vicar, and both the nave and chancel were reported to be in repair. What survives today is considerably reduced. The nave walls stand only about a metre high, with a south entrance and, still resting inside, a rectangular baptismal font of conglomerate stone, complete with a central drain-hole. The chancel, slightly better preserved at around two metres, appears to have been rebuilt at some point, perhaps repurposed as a mortuary chapel. A holy well dedicated to St Eusebius lies roughly a hundred metres to the north, and an unexplained mound site sits about forty metres to the south, giving the immediate landscape an unusually dense cluster of features for so quiet a spot.

The font is worth pausing over. Cut from conglomerate, a coarse sedimentary rock formed from cemented gravels and pebbles, it is small and plain, the kind of object that could easily be walked past. That it remains in situ, in an open and apparently unguarded ruin, is itself a small curiosity.

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