Site of Church, Newbawn, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
By the time the Ordnance Survey cartographers passed through County Wexford in 1839, the church at Newbawn had already faded so thoroughly from the landscape that they could only mark it in faint outline and label it in gothic lettering, the cartographic convention used to signal something ancient and no longer standing.
What they recorded was a rectangular footprint, roughly fifteen metres east to west and eight metres north to south, on a slight south-facing slope. That ghostly outline is still there if you know where to look.
The physical remains are modest but legible. The west wall survives to a length of about five metres, grass-covered now and merging with the ground, with fragments of the north and south walls extending from it and scattered rubble filling the spaces between. The whole sits within a graveyard of roughly equal dimensions on each side, around thirty-five metres square, its boundary formed by earthen banks faced with stone on the outside and softened by hedges. Somewhere within that enclosure stands a stoup, a small stone basin once used to hold holy water at a church entrance, which hints at the building's liturgical life even if nothing of its interior organisation survives above ground. The combination of a ruined church and a continuing burial ground is a familiar pattern in rural Ireland, where a community might abandon a roofless shell but continue to inter its dead in the consecrated ground around it for generations afterwards.
