Ecclesiastical enclosure, Shelbaggan, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Ecclesiastical Sites
In a level pasture at Shelbaggan in County Wexford, the ground gives nothing away.
There is no ruined wall, no weathered gravestone, no obvious depression to suggest that anything of consequence ever stood here. Yet this unremarkable field conceals the outline of an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of oval or circular boundary that once defined the sacred precinct of an early Irish church site, separating the religious community and its burials from the secular world beyond.
The site appears on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which records a small oval embanked enclosure measuring roughly 35 metres east to west and between 25 and 30 metres north to south, with a church indicated within it. By the time anyone looked closely at the ground, that above-ground evidence had entirely vanished beneath pasture. What restored some sense of the site's true scale was aerial photography. Vertical photographs taken in 1973 show traces of an enclosing element approximately 30 to 40 metres in diameter. More revealing still, aerial photographs from 1995 show a much larger ecclesiastical enclosure, somewhere between 80 and 90 metres across. That larger ring, invisible at ground level, suggests the site was once considerably more substantial than the 1839 map implied, with the smaller enclosure perhaps representing a later, contracted phase of use within an earlier and grander boundary.
For anyone passing through this part of south Wexford, there is little to see without the benefit of an aerial perspective. The field remains pasture, and the enclosures survive only as cropmarks or soilmarks legible from above. It is the kind of place that rewards knowing what to look for rather than what to look at.