Church (in ruins), Mill And Churchquarter, Co. Waterford

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Church (in ruins), Mill And Churchquarter, Co. Waterford

Somewhere in the graveyard at Churchquarter, a stone bearing an ogham inscription, one of Ireland's oldest forms of writing, has been re-erected near the western boundary wall. It stands among the remains of a medieval parish church that has largely dissolved back into the earth, its nave and chancel now little more than grass-covered ridges, with only fragments of the chancel's north, south, and east walls still rising to any height. Scattered across the enclosure are three pieces of decorative window tracery, detached from whatever openings once held them, and the chancel's east wall still contains an aumbry, a small recessed cupboard once used to store liturgical vessels, along with the remains of embrasured window openings in the east and south walls.

This was the parish church of Lisgennan, also known as Grange, an early ecclesiastical site occupying a slight rise on a south-facing slope, enclosed within a rectangular graveyard measuring roughly 65 metres east to west and between 40 and 50 metres north to south. The boundary is formed by earthen banks, stone-faced along the southern roadside edge. The church itself had a nave of approximately 13 metres by 6.2 metres internally, and a chancel of around 6 metres by 6.2 metres, a fairly modest but typical arrangement for a rural medieval parish church. Rev. P. Power documented the site in 1898 in his survey of Waterford's ruined churches. To the south of the church, in an adjacent field, there was once a holy well where a pattern, the traditional Irish gathering of prayer and community held on a saint's feast day, took place each year on the 15th of August. That well has since vanished; its exact location is now unknown, and archaeological testing carried out nearby in 2007 produced no related material to help locate it.

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