Wexford Heritage Trails

A possible 8th-century high cross beside medieval church ruins, a graveyard spanning three centuries, an 1835 parish church once ranked among the diocese's largest, the 15th-century Devereux castle that gave the village its name, and an 1820 farmhouse built quite literally from the castle's own stones.

A tiny harbour village guarding the mouth of Waterford Harbour: a 15th-century Knights Hospitaller castle with a murder hole, the ferry crossing to Passage East, a memorial to those lost at sea, the village school on the hill, and a clifftop graveyard marking the site of Ballyhack's long-vanished parish church.

From a Georgian country house and an Emancipation-era chapel to a shipwreck memorial and a medieval graveyard with its own beehive tomb, this short village-and-countryside walk traces two centuries of loss, faith and grand ambition along the River Blackwater.

The parish where Fr John Murphy led his own congregation into the 1798 Rebellion, later carried into song as one of Ireland's best-known rebel ballads.

A burned-out granite castle, a Pugin-designed village church, and a medieval well and church ruin sharing a graveyard on Bree Hill — a rural parish trail linking short walks by a couple of drives.

A Georgian Gothic church the architect William Burges later came to improve, a five-arch bridge once condemned as 'a disgrace to the progress of the age' before its 1875 rebuild, and the manse-and-church John Wesley's own preaching visits helped bring into being.

A short, flat stroll along Camolin's Main Street linking two 19th-century churches, the old National School and a surviving cast-iron Victorian hydrant.

From the site of one of neutral Ireland's rare wartime civilian tragedies and a former railway halt, out to the medieval ruins of Dunbrody Abbey and its never-finished castle, this short village walk and country stroll trace Campile's story from the 12th century to the Emergency.

A short loop through the heart of a Bannow Bay parish village — from a Victorian handball alley reputedly built with graveyard stone, past a Norman font rescued from a ruined coastal church, to the granite tower of the district's Church of Ireland parish.

The National-rated ruin of a Palladian mansion burnt in the Civil War, its 1862 gate lodge, a glebe house once home to a firsthand chronicler of the 1798 Rebellion, the site of a 1920 RIC barracks attack, and the parish church that schooled the folklorist who wrote 'The Banks of the Boro.'

A Famine-era harbour built by Lord Courtown at a cost of £25,000, a lifeboat station established in 1865 that closed in 1925 and was called back into service in 1990, its 1911 boathouse in blue limestone and red brick, and a beach whose reputation drew visitors long before the harbour or the railway ever arrived.

From a quiet 1858 parish church and a Toole family farmhouse to the Blue Flag strand that stood in for Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan, trace Curracloe's turn from a small farming and fishing parish into a planted coastline and film set.

An Elizabethan star fort that hosted two fleeing kings, a wandering lighthouse first raised in Cork, and a ruby-sandstone Catholic church built over five years in the 1890s.

Enniscorthy Castle, rebuilt by the Wallop family in the 1580s, Vinegar Hill where the decisive battle of the 1798 Rebellion was fought, Pugin's St Aidan's Cathedral, the National 1798 Rebellion Centre, and the Athenaeum overlooking Market Square — 5 stops through a Slaney-side town central to Irish rebel history.

Ferns Castle, raised by William Marshal on the former seat of Diarmait Mac Murchada, St Edan's Cathedral where Strongbow is traditionally said to be buried, the high crosses of the old churchyard, and the ruins of St Mary's Abbey holding Mac Murchada's own traditional grave marker — 4 stops through the ancient capital of the Kingdom of Leinster.

A bishop's medieval castle, a rebuilt 1837 church holding a bishop's grave, an 18th-century customs quay bombarded in 1798, and the burnt shell of an RIC barracks — plus the monument to nine lifeboatmen lost saving strangers from the sea in 1914.

A Georgian market house once used as a rebel prison in 1798, Christ Church with windows by Harry Clarke, Pugin's Catholic Church of St Michael the Archangel, a Celtic cross raised in 1898 to the rebellion's martyrs, and Ramsfort House, seat of the Ram family — 5 stops through a Wexford market town.

The oldest operational lighthouse in the world, built by William Marshal on a light tradition stretching to the 5th century, and a tower house that went from noble seat to salt store to tenement.

A quayside Gothic church, the lifeboat station that has launched rescues since 1847, and a 15th-century tower house that stood here long before the fishing harbour existed.

The Dunbrody Famine Ship, a replica of an 1840s emigrant vessel moored on the quay, St Mary's Church on the site of one of the largest medieval churches in Ireland or Britain, the historic Tholsel town hall, and the Kennedy Homestead at nearby Dunganstown, ancestral home of the Kennedy family — 4 stops through a River Barrow port town.

From the village parish church to Ireland's largest 1798 memorial atop Oulart Hill, this trail traces the opening rebel victory of Wexford's 1798 Rebellion.

From the Edwardian railway that put Rosslare Strand on the map to the golf links, grand hotel and church it grew around, a level stroll up Strand Road through Ireland's sunniest seaside resort.

A Cistercian abbey founded on a storm-tossed vow by William Marshal, later a Colclough family home for four centuries, with a Georgian walled garden hidden nearby.

A church remembering the man who wrote 'Abide With Me,' and a Gothic Catholic church whose windows came from the Harry Clarke studios in Dublin.

The ruins of Selskar Abbey, the last surviving of the town's medieval gates, the Bull Ring with its 1798 Rebellion pikeman monument, a Georgian church attributed to John Roberts of Waterford, and the site of Wexford's historic theatre, now its opera house — 5 stops through a Viking-founded, Norman-shaped town.