Church (in ruins), Tincurra, Co. Wexford

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Church (in ruins), Tincurra, Co. Wexford

What survives at Tincurra is barely visible above the ground: a low rectangle of grass-covered foundations, no more than half a metre to a metre high, sitting inside a circular enclosure in a quiet Wexford valley.

The building is modest even by the standards of early Irish churches, its interior measuring roughly eight metres east to west and just over three metres north to south. Yet the setting carries a particular kind of ecclesiastical strangeness, the sort that accumulates when a place has been quietly used, then quietly abandoned, over many centuries.

The site was the parish church of a detached portion of Taghmon parish, one of those administrative oddities that medieval Irish church geography threw up with some regularity, where a fragment of one parish found itself geographically separated from the rest and surrounded by the territory of another. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 recorded it under Coolstuff parish rather than Taghmon, which suggests the detachment was causing confusion even then. The church itself is oriented east to west in the standard manner, with an entrance gap of about 1.3 metres towards the western end of the south wall. More intriguing is the way the north wall extends further westward than the main body of the building, stretching to a total length of over thirteen metres, which points to the possibility of a second cell or ancillary structure attached to the church. The circular graveyard enclosing it, roughly 38 metres across and defined by a stone-faced earthen bank with traces of a fosse and outer bank to the north-east, is the kind of form associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, suggesting the settlement here is considerably older than any surviving fabric. Around twenty metres to the east of the graveyard enclosure lies Trinity Well, a holy well, which is a spring or water source that acquired religious significance, often pre-Christian in origin but absorbed into the Christian calendar under a saint's name or, as here, the name of the Trinity.

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