Site of Catholic Church, Houseland, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
A field in County Wexford holds the memory of a chapel that had already disappeared before anyone thought to photograph it.
On a south-facing slope in the townland of Houseland, a patch of pasture marks what the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded, in careful italic lettering, as the "Site of R.C. Chapel", indicating that even by the time the first systematic mapping of Ireland was underway, the building itself was already gone. The feature appears on that map only as a faint rectangular outline, roughly ten metres by ten metres, a modest footprint suggesting a small, plain structure rather than any kind of elaborate ecclesiastical building.
The place-name itself carries a possible clue to something older. A map of 1771 records the surrounding area under the name Heuclus, which the historian Philip Hore, writing between 1900 and 1911, suggested could be a corruption of the Gaelic word eaglais, simply meaning a church. If that reading is correct, the name had been attached to this ground long before anyone drew the rectangular outline on a survey sheet, pointing to a religious use of the site that may predate the chapel marked there by a considerable margin. By around 1900, Hore noted that the foundations of the structure were still faintly visible; today there is nothing at ground level, no stonework, no enclosure, no trace of burials in the grass. Nearby lies the site of St Helen's Well, a holy well dedicated to a saint whose name turns up across early Christian Ireland, and whose proximity here may suggest that this corner of Wexford was once a more coherent focus of local devotion than the empty field now implies.


