Church (in ruins), Ballykeerogemore, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
At the western end of the surviving chancel wall of this ruined County Wexford church, sitting on a drystone ledge, is a granite bullaun stone, a roughly oval boulder with a deliberately hollowed basin carved into its surface.
Bullaun stones are among the more enigmatic objects in the Irish archaeological record, found at early ecclesiastical sites and associated in folklore with healing, cursing, and the memory of particular saints. This one measures roughly half a metre across and its basin is about thirteen centimetres deep, small enough to be easily overlooked, old enough that no one can say with certainty how old it is.
The church itself, known as the parish church of Ballybrazil, sits within a triangular graveyard on the crest of a gentle west and south-facing slope. The enclosure, roughly eighty metres east to west, is defined by stone-faced earthen banks and hedges, its apex pointing west. What survives of the structure, the east gable and the upper portions of the north and south walls, may represent only the chancel, the eastern, liturgically significant section of the building, with the full original length estimated at around nineteen metres. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, conducted a visitation of his diocese, the building was already in a state of neglect. The curate at that time was one Thomas ffleming, and the record of the visitation notes plainly that both the church and chancel were in need of repair. The walls have continued their slow deterioration since; cracks running along the line of the small windows in the north and south walls have caused the east gable to tilt outward. That gable retains a narrow east-facing window, just over twenty centimetres wide and seventy-six centimetres tall, flanked on the interior by two alcoves with slate bases, each base carrying a semicircular niche on its outer edge, possibly designed to hold small devotional figures. The tops of the surviving walls are finished with an oversailing parapet, a projecting course of stonework fitted with drain holes to carry water clear of the face below.
The site sits within a cluster of related monuments. St Bridget's well lies approximately 430 metres to the north, and the remains of a bawn, the defensive enclosure of a fortified house, are about 200 metres to the south-southwest. A bawn of this kind would typically have been associated with a plantation-era settler household, placing this corner of Wexford within a broader pattern of early seventeenth-century land reorganisation. The proximity of the well, the ruined church, and the bullaun stone suggests a landscape that accumulated layers of use, sacred and secular, across several centuries.