Church (in ruins), Drillistown, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Drillistown, Co. Wexford

By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey mapped this corner of County Wexford, the church at Drillistown was already a ruin, and the cartographers noted as much in gothic lettering on their six-inch sheet.

A century later, the 1940 edition recorded the same fact in the same script, as though nothing had changed, because very little had. What remains today sits on a low, broad col, a gentle saddle of ground between rises, and amounts to little more than the lowest courses of a rectangular building, roughly eight metres long and four wide, oriented east to west in the customary manner of Christian churches. There are no visible architectural features left in the surviving stonework, just the basal walls and a wide scatter of cairn material where the rest of the building has collapsed and spread.

The site is thought to be the parish church of Killesk, enclosed within a D-shaped graveyard bounded by an overgrown earthen bank some two and a half metres wide. The northern and western sides of this bank retain an external stone facing, while the straight south-eastern side and parts of the adjacent walls have been built up with old spoil material. A relict roadway, the faint trace of a former approach route, is still discernible outside the perimeter on the northern and south-eastern sides. The graveyard itself holds a handful of headstones spanning a surprisingly long range, from 1715 through to 1985, though only the northern half of the enclosure has been used for burial. The southern half has gone entirely to undergrowth, leaving the space with an uneven, divided quality, part maintained, part reclaimed.

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