Site of Chapel, Aughclare, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Churches & Chapels

Site of Chapel, Aughclare, Co. Wexford

In a flat stretch of County Wexford countryside, at the lowest point in an otherwise level landscape, there is a patch of grass and rushes that sits just slightly below the surrounding ground.

It is D-shaped, roughly thirty metres east to west and eighteen metres north to south, and there is nothing above the surface to explain why it is there. No walls, no earthworks, no grave markers. Just a shallow depression that the land seems to have quietly swallowed.

What gives the place its name is a cartographic ghost. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks a subrectangular feature at this spot, approximately twenty metres north to south and twelve metres east to west, annotated in the italic lettering the OS used to denote antiquities: "Site of chapel." That phrasing, already in the past tense when the surveyors recorded it nearly two centuries ago, suggests the structure had vanished long before anyone came to measure it. The site is thought to be the location of a Catholic church, though no physical evidence of a building, a boundary enclosure, or a burial ground has been identified at ground level. The slight sinking of the terrain may hint at subsided foundations or disturbed earth beneath the surface, but that remains speculative.

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