Church (in ruins), Clonmines, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
One of the more telling details at the ruined parish church of Clonmines in County Wexford is a small round-headed piscina, a shallow stone basin used by a priest to rinse sacred vessels after Mass, still visible in the chancel wall where a two-light window was later blocked up.
Whoever did the blocking simply built around it, leaving the dressed granite basin and a plain aumbry, a small wall cavity used to store liturgical items, tucked into the masonry like an afterthought. It is a quietly odd survival, domestic in scale against the larger drama of a church that has been roofless for centuries.
The church is dedicated to St. Nicholas and sits on a slight eastward-facing slope, about 190 metres from the Owenduff and Corock river, within a rectangular graveyard bounded by a masonry wall to the north and earthen banks and trees on the other sides. The building follows the standard medieval plan of nave, chancel, and tower, but the tower, which still stands to roughly nine or ten metres and is thick with ivy, appears to have been added after the original structure was complete; its pointed doorway abuts the west gable rather than being bonded into it. The quoins are of chamfered granite and Dundry stone, the latter a distinctive oolitic limestone quarried near Bristol and widely exported to Irish medieval building sites, suggesting ambition and outside connections. Inside the tower a barrel vault was inserted at some point, and its supporting wall partly blocks an earlier doorway, a sequence of alterations compressed into a relatively small space. In June 1460 an ecclesiastical court was convened here, or possibly at the nearby fortified church just to the north-east, by Archdeacon Neville of Ferns, to consider the appointment of a new priest for the church of St. Martin at Rathmacknee. By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a visitation, a priest named Richard Allen was in post and both the church and chancel were recorded as being in repair. The ruin, then, was still a functioning building well into the seventeenth century.
The chancel is the best-preserved part of the structure, with walls standing to between 1.8 and 2.6 metres and the pointed chancel arch, five metres wide and around six metres high, still largely intact. The site of St. Nicholas' Well lies about 180 metres to the east-north-east, and a separate fortified church stands just a few metres to the north-east, making this a small but unusually concentrated cluster of medieval ecclesiastical remains.