Church, Longridge, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
Beneath a cereal field in Longridge, County Wexford, there is almost certainly a church.
Or what was one. The site is known, roughly, but there is nothing left to see above ground, no walls, no enclosure, no readable trace of a burial ground. What does survive are two stone gate-piers, each about three-quarters of a metre in diameter and rising to around 1.3 metres, now half-swallowed by a road bank to the south of the field. Locals in 1940 understood these piers to mark the entrance to the old church grounds, a piece of collective memory doing the work that the archaeology no longer can.
The site appears on the 1940 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled in the gothic lettering that cartographers traditionally reserved for antiquities, identifying it as a church and burial ground. Beyond that designation, the documentary record is thin. What adds texture to the silence is a local tradition that stone coffins were found somewhere in the vicinity, though no precise location or date is attached to those finds. About 350 metres to the north-north-west lies St Mochoaun's Well, also known as St Cuan's Well, a holy well associated with one of the early Irish saints whose name drifted across different spellings and local pronunciations over the centuries. The proximity of the well to the church site is not coincidental; in early medieval Ireland, ecclesiastical settlements and sacred water sources were frequently established in close relation to one another, the well often predating or outlasting the built structures around it.
The gate-piers protruding from the road bank are the only physical anchor the site has left. They are easy to overlook, and there is nothing formal to mark the field beyond them.