Church (in ruins), Grahormick, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Grahormick, Co. Wexford

Two baptismal fonts survive at this ruined church in Grahormick, Co. Wexford, which is itself an unusual detail.

One, a fragment of an octagonal font, sits inside the roofless nave; the other, a rectangular granite basin, stands outside the south doorway. That a church this modest should retain two fonts, one displaced and one still at the threshold, gives the place a quietly layered quality, as if its successive users kept reshaping it without ever fully erasing what came before.

The church was the parish church of Ballymore, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Its core is a nave measuring roughly 14.4 metres long internally, with ivy-covered walls that still stand close to their original roof height on three sides. At some point the building was extended with a chancel, a separate liturgical space beyond a pointed chancel arch of undressed stone, which was inserted into what had originally been the church's end wall. The ghost of the earlier arrangement is still visible: the embrasure of the original southeast window survives in the masonry directly above the arch, framed and redundant. Inside, a pointed aumbry, a small wall recess once used to store liturgical vessels, remains at the east end of the south wall, and a projecting shelf on the north side of the east wall likely once supported a statue. By the time the Church of Ireland bishop Thomas Ram conducted his visitation of the diocese in 1615, the church goes unmentioned, suggesting it had already fallen out of use and the parish had been absorbed into neighbouring Kilscoran before that date.

The ruins sit within a subrectangular graveyard enclosed by low earthen banks and hedges, entered from a public road through a gateway on the southwest side. The surrounding landscape is notably flat, which means the shell of the nave, still standing to about 2.3 metres on its better-preserved walls, is visible from some distance across the fields.

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