Site of Catholic Church, Ballydermody, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Churches & Chapels
A field in Ballydermody, County Waterford holds no visible trace of what once stood there. No stone, no earthwork, no worn threshold remains. Yet the ground near the Killeen stream was once the site of a Catholic chapel and, in all likelihood, a children's burial ground, two things that together speak to one of the more quietly devastating aspects of life in Penal Ireland.
The chapel here was what is known as a penal church, a place of Catholic worship built and used during the Penal Laws era, when the open practice of Catholicism was suppressed under legislation introduced in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Such buildings were typically simple, unobtrusive structures, constructed cheaply and often without permanent foundations, which goes some way towards explaining why nothing survives above ground today. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, the building was already gone, recorded only as "Site of RC Chapel." The OS Name Books also suggest that a children's burial ground was once attached to the site. These grounds, sometimes called cilliní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others considered ineligible for consecrated burial, including stillborn children. They are a recurring and often unmarked feature of the Irish landscape, sites of quiet grief that rarely appear in formal records.
The site lies in pasture roughly sixty metres south-west of the Killeen stream, on level ground. There is nothing to see on the surface, and for most visitors the location would be indistinguishable from any other grazed field in the county. Its significance is almost entirely cartographic and archival, preserved in the 1840 map annotation rather than in any physical form.