Saint Catherine's Chapel (in ruins), Petitstown, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Saint Catherine’s Chapel (in ruins), Petitstown, Co. Wexford

What remains of Saint Catherine's Chapel at Petitstown is not a ruin in any dramatic sense.

There are no standing walls, no collapsed doorways. Instead, a small rectangular outline survives as low earthen banks, barely half a metre high, sitting within a slight hollow in the rolling farmland of County Wexford. The whole structure measures just over six metres east to west and under five metres north to south, little larger than a modest room. Around it, shallow ditches mark where the chapel's own enclosure once was. It is the kind of site that could easily be walked past without a second thought.

What gives the place its quiet interest is the layering of history beneath and around it. The chapel sits on a raised, D-shaped platform, grassed over and edged with scrub, that was originally a rath, an enclosed circular or oval farmstead of early medieval origin, its outer fosse still traceable in the ground. The railway line between Rosslare and Waterford has clipped the southern edge of this older earthwork, cutting through a site that was already centuries old when the tracks were laid. The chapel itself is thought to date from the Penal era, the period following the Cromwellian conquest and the subsequent imposition of laws that severely restricted Catholic worship in Ireland. Its absence from a survey of neglected churches in the barony of Forth compiled by a writer named Synnott around 1680 has been taken as a possible indication that it was not an older, pre-Reformation structure but a more informal place of worship established under those constrained conditions. Roughly 220 metres to the south-south-east, Saint Catherine's Well survives, suggesting that devotion to the same saint persisted across this small corner of land in more than one form.

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