Rossminoge Church (in ruins), Rossminoge, Co. Wexford

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Rossminoge Church (in ruins), Rossminoge, Co. Wexford

What survives of the parish church at Rossminoge is largely a single wall and an absence.

The west gable, nearly intact to its apex and measuring 6.7 metres across, rises from a gentle east-facing slope in County Wexford, while the rest of the building has collapsed so completely that the nave now reads only as a sunken depression in the ground, roughly 13 metres east to west. It is the kind of ruin where the ground itself does the work of describing what stood there.

When the antiquarian John O'Donovan visited around 1840, he found rather more to record: the south wall was still partly standing, and the west gable carried what he described as a brick belfry. Both features are gone now, the doorway in the centre of the gable broken away as well. The graveyard surrounding the church is defined by an earthen bank with an unusual internal fosse, a ditch roughly 5.5 metres wide and 0.8 metres deep, running along the south-east side. Internal ditches of this kind are occasionally found at early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures, though their precise function is not always clear. The most unexpected survival sits in the south-west corner of the graveyard: the head of a granite high cross, nearly a metre tall and almost as wide, ringed in the traditional manner but with no piercing through the ring and no decorative carving anywhere on its surface. One arm is missing. It stands upright in its original granite socket base, which suggests it has not been moved, even if its plainness makes it difficult to date with any confidence.

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