Graveyard, Bregorteen, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Grounds
Beneath a field of pasture in Bregorteen, County Wexford, lies the site of a vanished parish church and its associated graveyard, erased so thoroughly that nothing now breaks the surface of the grass.
The site was cleared around 1970, leaving no visible trace of what had once occupied the land.
The church belonged to the parish of Kilbrideglynn and sat within a triangular enclosure, an unusual shape that itself hints at an older landscape logic, possibly following field boundaries or natural features that predate the Ordnance Survey era. The first edition of the six-inch OS map, surveyed in 1839, recorded the enclosure at roughly 60 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south. By the time the 1924 edition was published, those dimensions had apparently contracted to around 40 metres by 25 metres, suggesting either a gradual reduction of the boundary or differences in how the surveyors interpreted the edges of the site. Neither edition describes it explicitly as a graveyard, though that is what it appears to have been, a fact that only adds to the quietness of its disappearance from the record and from the ground itself.