Saint Patrick's Church, Wexford, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
One of the more quietly peculiar features of this medieval parish church in Wexford town is not immediately obvious from the outside: the building has two naves running side by side, separated internally by an arcade of four arches.
This double-nave arrangement, relatively uncommon in Irish medieval church architecture, gives the structure an unusually square, almost symmetrical footprint, with the internal length and total internal width measuring nearly the same at just under thirteen metres each. The church sits on a slight rise within a roughly rectangular graveyard, and its western boundary is formed not by a conventional enclosure wall but by the town wall itself, a reminder of how tightly the medieval fabric of Wexford was stitched together.
By 1615, when Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, carried out a formal visitation of the parish, the church was in the care of a vicar named William Roche, and both the church and chancel were recorded as being in repair. The chancel, extending some nine and a half metres, has since lost almost everything except its southern wall, so what survives today is largely the nave structure. Two bellcotes add an unusual doubling effect to the roofline: a double bellcote sits over the west gable of the northern aisle, while a Sanctus bellcote, the smaller bell rung at the moment of consecration during Mass, sits over the chancel arch of the southern nave. Windows tell their own story of alteration over time. The western window of the southern aisle was probably originally a simple lancet, but the northern aisle received an inserted triple-light limestone window with cusped ogee-heads, a more decorative later addition. A matching triple-light ogee-headed window survives at the eastern end of the southern nave wall, also likely inserted rather than original. Most of the other window openings survive only as embrasures, their glazing long gone. The graveyard, notably, contains no surviving memorial monuments.