Church (in runs), Coolhull, Co. Wexford

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Church (in runs), Coolhull, Co. Wexford

A granite baptismal font sitting in the corner of a ruined church is an unusual survival, and at Coolhull in County Wexford it is very nearly all that remains above ground to signal this site's age and purpose.

The walls of the rectangular church, roughly twelve metres long and just under seven wide, have been worn down to between one and one and a half metres in height, and the building's interior offers little to read except that font, subrectangular and solid, tucked into the south-west angle. Attached to the east wall outside is a rectangular cairn, a low mound of stones roughly five metres by four and a metre high, whose precise function is not recorded. The whole ensemble sits within a circular graveyard about thirty-four metres across, defined by an earthen bank and hedge, raised slightly on a gentle bluff above an otherwise level landscape.

The church is dedicated to St Imoge or Shemoge, names that preserve, in worn-down form, the memory of St Díomán of Clonkeen in County Limerick. Díomán was a hermit associated with the Céli Dé, a reform movement within the early Irish church that emphasised austerity and communal religious observance. His death is recorded in 811, and his feast day fell on the 10th of December. That date mattered locally in a practical as well as a devotional sense: about 375 metres to the south of the church lies St Imock's Well, also known as Shemoge Well, where patterns were held on the 10th of December. A pattern, in Irish tradition, was a gathering at a holy well or saint's site on the relevant feast day, combining prayer with communal assembly, and sometimes with more secular activity besides. The pairing of a ruined church and an active well, both oriented around the same calendar date, suggests a local cult of some persistence, even if the church itself long since fell out of use.

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