Site of Church, Kilcannon, Co. Wexford

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Church, Kilcannon, Co. Wexford

At the foot of a steep, wooded scarp on the edge of the River Slaney's flood-plain in County Wexford, a pasture field holds the faint remains of a church that has long since dissolved back into the earth.

The site is modest, a rubble-strewn and overgrown patch measuring roughly 17 metres east to west and 14 metres north to south, with little more than the ghost of foundations still readable at ground level. What makes it quietly anomalous is the combination of features gathered in such a small compass: a lost church, the curve of an old enclosure, and a holy well, all huddled together at the valley's edge with the Slaney running some 120 metres to the east.

The site appeared on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1839 and 1940, each time marked simply as the site of a church, suggesting the building had already vanished by the time the first systematic mapping of Ireland was carried out in the nineteenth century. What does survive is an arc of an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that typically defined early Irish religious sites, preserved here as a low scarp running roughly north-north-east to east-south-east for around 78 metres just to the east of the church foundations. There is no evidence of burial within the area, which sets it apart from many comparable sites. About 40 metres to the south-west lies a holy well, a feature that frequently accompanies early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland and often points to origins considerably older than the church buildings that later grew up beside them.

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