Church in ruins, St. Iberius, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
What remains of the parish church of St Iberius is, by any measure, a fragment.
A single west gable, standing 4.5 metres high and nearly a metre thick, rises from a subrectangular graveyard on a slight rise above the northern end of Lady's Island Lough in County Wexford. Parts of the north and south walls cling to it, clay-bonded and low, and the south wall retains a round-headed doorway of undressed stone, just under a metre wide. Putlog-holes, the small square sockets left behind when timber scaffolding is removed during construction, are still visible in the gable face. It is a church reduced almost entirely to its own memory.
When the antiquarian John O'Donovan recorded the building around 1840, considerably more was standing. He noted a nave of roughly 12.7 metres by 4.8 metres and a chancel of approximately 6.8 metres by 4.35 metres, the two separated by a round chancel arch. The lough itself carried a different name in an earlier period; a certain Synnott, writing around 1680, called it Lough Togher rather than Lady's Island Lough. The destruction of the church is traditionally attributed to Cromwellian forces, and the story became attached to a small crucifixion figure, roughly 12 centimetres high, found in 1887 at the head of the lake close to the ruins. Local tradition held that the figure had been lost when the church was destroyed. It was recovered and is now kept in the Catholic Church of the Assumption, about 700 metres to the south, where it can still be seen.