Church (in ruins), Yoletown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
On the south-eastern edge of a plateau in County Wexford, flanked by the Owenduff River to the east and a small stream to the south, a ruined church sits within a graveyard shaped like the letter D.
That outline, roughly 55 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, is defined by an earthen bank and hedge with remnants of stone-facing on the inner side and a proper masonry wall where it meets a roadside to the south-west. It is the kind of place that rewards a slow look: the walls stand almost to their original roof height in places, yet the west wall has been reduced to a few courses, and whoever stripped this building of its dressed stone was thorough enough to take every last piece from the large east window.
The church served as the parish church of Owenduff, and what survives inside tells something of how it functioned. A drawbar socket remains on the east side of a doorway near the western end of the south wall, the slot into which a timber bar would have slid to secure the door from within. Nearby, towards the eastern end of the same wall, there is a plain aumbry, a small recess cut into the masonry and used to store sacred vessels or books. A circular granite font, just over sixty centimetres in external diameter, still sits inside the church, its interior bowl roughly forty-five centimetres across. Around 1840, the scholar and place-name researcher John O'Donovan noted the existence of a holy well called Tobar Cholmáin within about 200 metres of the church. A holy well is typically a natural spring associated with a local saint and used for devotional purposes, often carrying a curative reputation. O'Donovan's record was later published in the 1930s, but the well's exact location has since been lost.