site of Chapel and Burial Ground, Ballymaclare, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

site of Chapel and Burial Ground, Ballymaclare, Co. Wexford

In a pasture on the eastern foothills of Slievecoilte in County Wexford, a chapel and its burial ground have all but vanished into the grass.

The site shows nothing at ground level today, yet by around 1970 there was still enough of it to form a visible cairn of accumulated material, the kind of low mound that tends to mark where stone structures have slowly collapsed and been absorbed into the soil over centuries. That cairn was cleared away, and what emerged from it tells a quiet story about what once stood here.

The earliest cartographic evidence comes from the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which records a rectangular structure measuring roughly 12 metres east to west and 6 metres north to south, set within a graveyard enclosure of approximately 30 metres in each direction. The italic lettering used on that map, reserved for sites already understood as historical rather than living, suggests that by the early nineteenth century the chapel had long since fallen out of use. When the cairn was cleared around 1970, two objects came to light. One was a granite bullaun stone, a boulder with a deliberately hollowed basin ground into its surface, objects associated across Ireland with early ecclesiastical sites and occasionally with pre-Christian ritual use. This one measures roughly half a metre by 40 centimetres, with a single basin about 23 centimetres across and 12 centimetres deep. The other find was a fragment of a late medieval window sill in green stone, a detail that places at least part of the chapel's construction or renovation somewhere in the later medieval period. The site sits in a shallow west-to-east valley, with a north-south stream running about 170 metres to the east, and a further enclosure lies roughly 110 metres to the north, suggesting this may once have formed part of a small cluster of related features in the landscape.

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