Church (in ruins), Ballyconnick, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
Inside the ruined walls of the parish church at Ballyconnick, set into the ground near the west end, sits a granite font that was never finished.
The rectangular basin was carved out of the stone block, but whoever made it never cut a drain-hole. Whether the work was abandoned, interrupted, or simply left incomplete for reasons now irrecoverable, the font has remained in that state ever since, a small puzzle lodged in the earth of a church that itself barely survives. The walls of the nave and chancel stand no higher than 1.7 metres in places, heavily overgrown, and the chancel arch, the structural span that once divided the body of the church from its sanctuary, has partially collapsed.
The church is reputed to be dedicated to St Degumen, a Welsh saint also known as Decuman, whose cult appears to have spread across the Irish Sea during the early medieval period of Christian exchange between Wales and Ireland. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation of his diocese, the building was still in use. A curate named Richard Devereux was recorded as serving the chapel, which was in repair at that date but administratively linked to the nearby parish of Taghmon. The graveyard enclosing the ruin is subrectangular and defined by masonry walls, with an original north gate now disused and a modern entrance cut at the south-west corner.
The site sits at the eastern edge of a plateau, overlooking a stream valley roughly 130 metres to the west. What makes the present setting particularly striking is its proximity to a large quarry, whose man-made cliffs now rise just to the west and north of the graveyard, pressing in on the old ground in a way that feels genuinely disorienting, the ancient and the industrial arranged in awkward adjacency.