(Site of) Templeboy, Battlestown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Churches & Chapels
On a gently sloping field in County Wexford, there is a place recorded on an 1839 Ordnance Survey map as something that no longer visibly exists.
The cartographers of that survey noted a faintly marked circular enclosure, roughly thirty to thirty-five metres across, labelled as the site of a church called Templeboy. Today, the ground offers nothing to confirm that record. Grass and scrub cover the area, and there are no visible remains of a structure, a burial, or even the enclosure itself.
The name Templeboy suggests a small early church, and the broader landscape gives some clues as to its purpose. Battlestown was part of the estate of Dunbrody Abbey, the substantial Cistercian monastery founded in the twelfth century on the southern shore of the Barrow estuary. A bawn, or walled enclosure, associated with a castle site lies approximately seven hundred metres to the east, and the chapel at Templeboy is thought to have served the community gathered around that settlement. In other words, this was probably never a major ecclesiastical site; it would have functioned as a local chapel, modest in scale, tied to the agricultural and domestic life of people living under the influence of one of Wexford's most powerful monastic landlords.
What makes the place quietly compelling is the gap between the map and the ground. By 1839, the cartographers were already recording an absence, noting not a church but the site of one, and tracing an enclosure so faint it barely registered on paper. Whatever stood here had already slipped below the threshold of legibility, leaving only a circular ghost in the landscape and a name attached to nothing solid.
