Church, Wilkinstown, Co. Wexford

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Church, Wilkinstown, Co. Wexford

A small granite font, roughly the size of a kitchen sink, sits cemented atop a low cairn of quartz stones in a County Wexford graveyard.

There is no church around it. The walls are gone, the nave is gone, the chancel is gone, and what remains of the parish church of Whitechurchglynn amounts to this single liturgical object, propped up on a mound of pale stones as though someone wanted to make sure it was not forgotten.

The D-shaped graveyard occupies a gentle south-facing slope at Wilkinstown, its boundary defined partly by an earthen bank with external stone-facing, partly by a masonry wall to the north, and partly by a hedge. The church it once contained had already begun to fall apart by the early seventeenth century. A visitation carried out by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, in 1615 recorded that the priest of Whitechurch, or Mathurein as it was also known, was one Richard Hore, and that while the church itself was still in repair at that date, the chancel had already fallen into ruin. Whatever survived of the structure in the centuries that followed has since vanished entirely. The font, a rectangular granite basin with a central drain-hole and internal dimensions of roughly 42 by 37 centimetres, is the sole physical trace of the building. A font of this kind would have held the water used for baptism, and its presence here suggests someone retrieved it from the rubble and gave it a deliberate resting place rather than letting it disappear. About 270 metres to the south-south-west, a natural spring known as Lady's Well adds a further layer of devotional history to the immediate landscape, suggesting the area carried religious significance well before any formal church was built. The graveyard itself continues to be used; it was extended eastward by around 40 metres in 1997.

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