Church

The National Monuments Service's description

The site of the parish church of St John's is situated on a NE-facing slope and just outside the town walls of Wexford and on the NW side of St. John’s Gate St. It is within a rectangular graveyard (dims c. 60m NE-SW; c. 20-25m NW-SE) defined by masonry walls. According to a Visitation by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns, in 1615 the church was impropriate to the Knight’s Hospitaller of Kilclogan, David Browne was the curate and the church and chancel were in repair (Hore 1900-11, vol. 6, 267). It was described by Robert Leigh in 1684 as a church with a steeple, but its stones had been used to repair the castle (WX037-032001-) (ibid. vol. 5, 84).

There are no visible remains of the church but a sarcophagus (H 1.6m; Wth 0.6m; T 0.32m; D 0.26m) with three drain-holes (Bradley 1988, 90) is set upright in the graveyard. Archaeological testing (03E0204) identified a ditch (Wth 4m; D 0.65m) containing post-medieval pottery running NW-SE c. 8m NE of the graveyard wall, which may be part of an original boundary of the graveyard or a field boundary (Moloney and Gleeson 2003). A number of burials, largely post-medieval in date on artefactual evidence, were excavated (03E0204) inside the line of this boundary, but one of them produced a C14 date of AD 1430-1640 (MacDomhnaill 2008). (Cullen 1895, 375; Hore 1906, vol. 5, 84).

The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Wexford' (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1996). In certain instances the entries have been revised and updated in the light of recent research.

Compiled by: Michael Moore

Date of upload/revision: 18 December, 2012
Amended: 2 Sep. 2013

References

Mac Domhnaill, B. 2008 Final report on the archaeological excavation of a proposed development at John's Gate Street, Wexford town. Unpublished report, Headland Archaeology.

Cullen, J.B. 1895 The ancient chruches of the town of Wexford, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, vol. 25, 369-77.

Moloney, C. and Gleeson, C. 2003 Archaeological testing at St. John's Gate Street, Wexford. Unpublished report, Headland Archaeology.

Bradley, J. 1988 Anglo-Norman Sacrophagi in Ireland. In G.M. Niocaill and P.F. Wallace (eds), Keimelia: studies in medieval history and archaeology in memory of Tom Delaney, 74-94. Galway University Press.