Screen Grave Yard, Ballymore, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Screen Grave Yard, Ballymore, Co. Wexford

A raised rectangular graveyard sitting on the western edge of a low north-south ridge in County Wexford might not announce itself as a place of particular archaeological interest, yet the ground around the old parish church of Screen has been quietly giving up evidence of a far more substantial medieval presence than its modest appearance suggests.

The graveyard itself measures roughly 39 metres east to west and 27 metres north to south, and in its north-eastern corner sits an object recorded as a possible font, the kind of stone basin once used for baptismal rites, though its identification here remains tentative.

What makes the site genuinely interesting is what lies just to the west of the graveyard boundary. A geophysical survey carried out by Earthsound Archaeological Geophysics examined a field of approximately 60 metres in each direction and returned evidence of two possible ditches along with a scatter of pits beneath the surface. Geophysical survey works by detecting anomalies in soil conditions without breaking ground, giving archaeologists a kind of shadow-map of buried features before any spade is lifted. Subsequent archaeological testing confirmed that features were present across the area, mostly pits, though none were fully excavated. The finds recovered from those investigations pointed firmly toward the high medieval period, and one object in particular stands out: a late fifteenth-century Geraldine groat. The Geraldines were the great Hiberno-Norman dynasty of the Fitzgeralds, and coins bearing their mark circulated in the south and east of Ireland during a period when the family held considerable regional power. A single coin of that kind, turning up in a field beside a parish churchyard in Wexford, quietly reframes what might otherwise seem like an unremarkable agricultural landscape.

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