Church (in ruins), Ballybrennan Big, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Ballybrennan Big, Co. Wexford

What remains of the parish church at Ballybrennan Big is, by any measure, a fragment; the west wall is gone entirely, and most of the north wall with it.

Yet what survives is precise and quietly accomplished. The south wall still carries a pointed doorway set within an elliptical embrasure, its arch of undressed stone fitted with a hanging-eye for a door. The windows, narrow and carefully dressed in granite with touches of green stone, each retain their hanging-eyes for internal shutters, and two still show glazing grooves. At the east end of the south wall there is a plain aumbry, a small wall recess used to store liturgical vessels, and a broken shelf survives on the north side of the east window. A rectangular granite font, roughly 68 by 60 centimetres and still of decent depth, sits within the graveyard enclosure. These are the details of a working parish church, built with care and used for generations, even if the building itself is now largely open to the sky.

The church occupies a subrectangular graveyard defined by earthen banks planted with trees, with a masonry wall closing the south side. A lane of about 110 metres connects it to the N25 road between Wexford town and Rosslare. The landscape around it is flat and low-lying, with a small stream running north to south just to the east, and the original south-western edge of South Wexford harbour lying roughly 300 metres to the north. That proximity to the old harbour mouth is worth pausing over; this was once a church at the edge of a working coastal inlet. About 175 metres to the south-east lies the site of St Keevil's Well, where patterns, the traditional Irish gatherings of prayer and communal assembly held at holy wells on a saint's feast day, were observed each year on the 27th of August. Ballybrennan Castle stands approximately 200 metres to the north-east, placing the church within a small cluster of medieval features that together suggest a settled, organised community in this corner of County Wexford.

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