Lady's Church, Taghmon, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
What survives of Lady's Church in Taghmon is almost nothing: a short stretch of ivy-covered wall, roughly two metres long and just over two metres high, standing inside a walled graveyard.
That is all that remains of a structure once substantial enough to warrant its own entry, in gothic lettering no less, on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it was recorded as a neat rectangle measuring approximately fifteen metres east to west and five metres north to south. The gap between that cartographic presence and what exists on the ground today is the quietly unsettling thing about this place.
The chapel's origins are obscure, but it was already a ruin by the late seventeenth century. Robert Leigh, writing in 1684, mentioned two ruined chapels in the area, and Lady's Church is thought to be one of them. By around 1840, the antiquarian John O'Donovan could still observe part of the east gable standing to a height of roughly two and a half metres, which makes the subsequent loss all the more striking. The site sits in the orbit of St. Munna's monastery, a foundation associated with Munna of Taghmon, a sixth-century Irish saint. A granite high cross, now reduced to its base and head, is the principal surviving remnant of that monastery nearby, and its influence seems to have carried into the graveyard itself: a granite grave-marker there, with a solid ringed head, the kind of circular halo-like form seen on early medieval Irish crosses, appears to echo the older cross's design. Archaeological testing to the south-west of the graveyard in 1994 turned up no features of interest beneath the soil, suggesting the physical record of the site has been largely exhausted above ground.
