Church, Lake, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
In a flat field in County Wexford, locals have long known one particular patch of ground as "the church field".
There is almost nothing to see there now, just a low rectangular platform barely thirty centimetres above the surrounding soil, yet the place carries two names, Chapel Larden and Chapel Sarden, and a memory that Catholic Mass was quietly said here until sometime around 1800 to 1820. That it appeared on an Ordnance Survey map only as late as 1940, and only on that single edition, suggests it had already faded from official visibility long before it faded from local memory.
The context is the Penal era, the period broadly spanning the late seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries when Catholic worship in Ireland was legally suppressed or severely restricted, and Mass was frequently celebrated in informal structures or in the open air. A "Mass house" of this kind, as the historian Grattan Flood described it in 1915, would typically have been a modest, unadorned building, built to serve a congregation rather than to last. Archaeological testing carried out under licence reference 07E0530 confirmed the presence of a clay-bonded wall, that is, a wall laid without mortar, between 0.6 and 0.7 metres wide, consistent with a simple rural structure. More unexpectedly, the investigation also uncovered a fosse, a ditch roughly 1.5 to 1.8 metres wide and 0.7 metres deep, which predated the church platform itself. This earlier ditch formed a roughly circular enclosure some 30 to 35 metres in diameter, and coarse medieval ceramics recovered from it indicate activity on the site well before the Penal-era building was ever constructed. A possible entrance was identified at the north-west, where the ditch shows a terminal break. No burials were found anywhere on the site.
What emerges is a place with at least two distinct phases of use separated by several centuries, a medieval enclosure whose purpose remains unclear, and a later Catholic chapel that persisted through one of the more difficult periods of Irish religious life before disappearing so completely that only a slight rise in a Wexford field, and a name passed between neighbours, marks it today.