Site of Old Chapel, Balreask Old, Co. Meath

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Churches & Chapels

Site of Old Chapel, Balreask Old, Co. Meath

On the eastern lip of a plateau above the River Boyne, a yard covers what was once a chapel and its associated burial ground.

There are no stones visible, no outline in the grass, no weathered cross to catch the eye. The site survives only in maps and documents, a place that has been steadily buried under the ordinary business of land use while the Boyne continues past, roughly 150 metres to the north-east.

The paper trail, however, goes back a considerable distance. During the ecclesiastical taxation carried out between 1302 and 1306 under Pope Nicholas IV, a chapel at a place recorded as De Baliresk was already noted as being attached to the church of Navan. By the time of the Suppression of the monasteries in 1540, a house and 2.75 acres known as the Chapell lands were listed among the possessions of St. Mary's Abbey in Navan, suggesting the site had accumulated some practical value alongside its religious function. It appears again in the Down Survey of 1656 to 1658, the ambitious mapping project commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to record Irish land ownership, where a church or church land at Ballreask is shown on the barony map of Navan. A generation later, Dopping's Visitation of 1682 to 1685, a Church of Ireland survey of parishes, also records a church here. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1836, the language had already shifted; the feature is labelled simply as the site of an old chapel, placed towards the northern corner of an area marked as a burying ground measuring roughly 40 metres on each side. The later 25-inch Ordnance Survey map shows the same enclosure rendered as a rectangular hachured feature, slightly reduced in one dimension, but still recognisable as a defined space.

What makes the site quietly strange is precisely this gap between documentary persistence and physical absence. For roughly four centuries, surveyors, taxation officials, Church of Ireland visitors, and cartographers all found reason to record this place. Then the ground closed over it. Nothing is visible today, the chapel and graveyard swallowed by whatever structures and surfaces have accumulated above them since the maps were drawn.

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Pete F
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