Church (in ruins), Churchtown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
Buried in the floor of the southern aisle of a roofless medieval church in County Wexford, there is a small granite bullaun stone, its single cup-shaped basin worn into the rock over centuries of use.
Bullaun stones, ancient hollowed boulders associated with early Christian sites and occasionally with pre-Christian ritual, are common enough across Ireland, but finding one half-submerged inside a standing ruin, surrounded by ogee-headed windows still bearing their glazing grooves, gives some sense of the layered strangeness of this place. The church dedicated to St. Catherine at Tacumshin sits within a subrectangular graveyard on a gentle east-facing slope, its ivy-covered walls sheltering more detail than a casual glance would suggest.
The church is documented from the early fifteenth century, and the names of many of its clergy survive in the historical record. By 1615, when Bishop Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, compiled his observations, a vicar named Philip Rawe held the living, and both the nave and chancel were reported to be in good repair. What stands today is a nave and chancel church with a surviving southern aisle and the ghost of a northern one, visible only in foundation courses. The southern aisle is the most complete part of the structure, reaching nearly to its original roof height, and it retains three round arches of dressed limestone voussoirs leading from the nave, corbels that once supported rood screens, a tomb niche, and a statue shelf. The chancel arch has a hagioscope, a small angled opening cut through the pier so that those standing in the nave could see the high altar. On the chancel floor lies a graveslab over two metres long, incised with a floriated cross and a Latin inscription commemorating John Ingram, tentatively identified as a Canon of Ferns in 1304. Immediately to the west of the medieval ruin stands a cruciform Church of Ireland building erected in 1835 for the Ecclesiastical District of Churchtown, its own walls now also in a state of ruin, so that two consecutive attempts at the same dedication end up occupying the same small field. St Catherine's Well lies roughly 115 metres to the east-southeast, and two castle sites, Hay and Siggins, sit within 550 metres of the church, suggesting that this corner of south Wexford was once considerably more consequential than its present quiet state implies.