site of Church, Ballylannan, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped this part of County Wexford in 1839, the church at Ballylannan had already become a memory.
The six-inch map marks it only faintly, as a rectangular outline roughly ten metres east to west and six metres north to south, labelled simply as the site of a church. Even that ghost of a building was nearly gone. The scholar John O'Donovan, passing through the area around 1840, noted that the east gable was still standing, a single wall holding out against the field. Nothing of that survives today.
What remains is a slightly sunken, grass-covered area set on a shelf of an east-facing slope, with a small stream running north to south about seventy metres to the east. The ground dimensions, roughly ten metres by seven, correspond closely to the footprint recorded on the earlier map. Scattered across the surface are dressed stones, and at least one carries a chamfer, the bevelled edge cut along an arris that was a common detail in medieval ecclesiastical stonework. It suggests craft and intention, a building made with some care rather than thrown up quickly. There is no sign of a surrounding enclosure, and no evidence of burial, which means the site does not appear to have functioned as a graveyard in any recorded or visible way. How old the church was, who built it, and when it fell out of use are questions the ground does not yet answer.