Site of Church, Carrick, Co. Wexford

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Church, Carrick, Co. Wexford

At the south-western end of a low ridge in County Wexford, a former parish church and its graveyard have all but vanished from the landscape.

No headstones protrude, no walls survive, and the ground gives little away. What remains is a single circular granite basin, set into the earth on the spot where the church once stood, measuring roughly 92 to 94 centimetres across on the outside and just under half a metre in diameter on the inside. It is thought to be an unfinished baptismal font, the kind of stone vessel that would ordinarily have been hollowed out and fitted with a drain-hole to allow water to flow away after baptisms. This one has no drain-hole. What it does have, around the flat upper rim, are eight or nine shallow circular depressions, each only a few centimetres deep, whose purpose nobody has yet satisfactorily explained. One possibility is that they are simply tool marks or working hollows left over from the process of quarrying and shaping the stone, a sign that the basin was abandoned mid-production rather than ever put to liturgical use.

The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows the church as a faint rectangular outline, roughly ten metres long, sitting towards the south-western edge of a subcircular or D-shaped graveyard measuring approximately eighty metres east-north-east to west-south-west and sixty metres north-north-west to south-south-east. The D-shaped enclosure form is a recognised feature of early Irish ecclesiastical sites, and the shape of the boundary here suggests the site may have considerably older origins than its nineteenth-century cartographic appearance implies. Three stone crosses recorded about three hundred metres to the north-east are thought to have originated at this site, presumably moved or dispersed at some point after the church fell out of use, taking with them almost the last physical evidence that a religious community once gathered on this quiet ridge.

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