The church at Saunderscourt is picturesquely situated in a walled graveyard at the centre of a farmed field. It is believed to be late medieval in origin and is recorded in 1615 as part of a Visitation by Thomas Ram, the Protestant bishop of Ferns. At that time Richard Hore was the curate and even at that early stage the ‘church was in repair but the chancel was in ruins’.  Another issue which confuses the dating of this church is that the 13^th century Romanesque doorway originally belonged to the church of St David in Ballynaslaney. At some point, most likely during the late 17^th century the church became the private chapel for the house of Saunderscourt. The palatial mansion at Saunderscourt was built by Colonel Robert Saunders who came to Ireland in the 1650s with Oliver Cromwell and was granted 3,700 acres in Wexford. The house had passed through the Saunders family to the Colonels’ great granddaughter Jane Saunders, an only child, who married Arthur Gore, the 1^st Earl of Arran. The house and lands then passed down through the Earl of Arran’s family, and then when the 2^nd Earl died in 1809 his heir abandoned the house and it fell into ruin. In 1837 the fourth Earl attempted to revive the estate but this work was never completed and the house changed hands a number of times before falling into ruin and ultimately being demolished in the 1890s. The church at Saunderscourt functioned as a Church of Ireland place of worship into the late 19th century but eventually its eastern part was converted into a mausoleum for Napier Gore family from the 1840s and ceased to be used as a place of worship when the new Church of Ireland Church opened at Kyle, 2.5kms away, in 1869. The majority of burials in the graveyard that surrounds the church date from 1753-1935.

GPS: 52.36712, -6.49858