Site of Church, Nash, Co. Wexford

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Church, Nash, Co. Wexford

A church that has essentially vanished into the ground is an unusual thing to visit, yet the site at Nash in County Wexford is more legible than it first appears.

What survives above the surface is a rectangular graveyard, roughly 40 metres by 30 to 45 metres, bounded by earthen banks and hedges rather than stone walls, with a low cairn, about 7 metres by 3 metres and standing just a metre high, as the only visible marker of the building that once stood here. The church itself has gone entirely at ground level; there are no upstanding walls, no tumbled masonry, no obvious outline. The site sits on a gentle south-west-facing slope where the land begins to fall away towards the valley of a small stream, at the point where that stream bends south-east, a quiet and rather precise topographical setting of the kind that early ecclesiastical communities tended to favour.

The church was already mostly gone by around 1840, when the scholar John O'Donovan, working on the Ordnance Survey's documentation of Irish placenames and antiquities, noted that the foundation courses were then still visible. By that point the building appeared on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map only as a faint rectangular outline, roughly 20 metres north-east to south-west and 10 metres across. The dedication of the associated holy well, located about 40 metres south of the graveyard, to St Colman offers a thread back towards the early medieval period, though the well itself is a separate site. Archaeological testing carried out in 2013 in the field immediately to the east of the graveyard recovered pottery dating to the late twelfth or thirteenth century, alongside pits, gullies, and ditches. A ditch roughly 50 metres east of the graveyard, approximately 2 metres wide and at least 0.7 metres deep, appears to be centred on the church site and may represent the boundary of an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of circular or curvilinear perimeter ditch that often defined early Irish religious settlements and continued in use into the medieval period.

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