Church (in ruins), Tellarought, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
There is a medieval parish church at Tellarought in County Wexford that has vanished so completely that nothing remains at ground level.
The site now lies absorbed within the expanded graveyard of the modern Roman Catholic church, the old building's footprint invisible underfoot, its existence known primarily because a cartographer noted it, faintly, on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839.
The documentary record, patchy as it is, offers some intriguing contradictions. When Robert Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a visitation in 1612, a priest named John Alcocke was recorded as serving the parish. By the 1615 visitation, no priest was listed at all, yet that same document noted that the church and its chancel were in good repair. It is a small puzzle: a functioning building without an apparent incumbent. By around 1840, the scholar and place-name surveyor John O'Donovan described the structure as almost gone. It measured roughly ten metres by five, a modest rectangle set on a slight south-west-facing slope in a shallow valley. Earlier still, Samuel Lewis writing in 1837 recorded that Tellarought had once been an extensive settlement, with remains turned up by ploughing, though where exactly those finds were made is no longer known. Within a short distance of the vanished church, the wider landscape retains other traces of an older inhabited world: a tower house lies around fifty metres to the south-west, and two wells are close by. Lady's Well sits roughly forty metres to the south, while St Bridget's Well, approximately one hundred metres to the south-west, is still actively venerated today. Holy wells dedicated to Bridget are found across Ireland, typically associated with healing, pilgrimage, and the annual festival of Imbolc on the first of February. That one survives in use here, while the church above ground does not, says something quiet about which forms of observance endure.