Historic Sites in County Wexford

Four of these ten sites sit in or beside New Ross, which makes the town the obvious base. The Dunbrody Famine Ship is a full-scale working replica of a three-masted barque that carried emigrants out of the port in the 1840s, and the hour-long guided tour through steerage is the visit rather than a walk-round-yourself museum. Dunganstown, in the same corner of the county, is the farm Patrick Kennedy left for Boston in 1848, still worked by his descendants. St Mary’s, on a rise above the Barrow, sets a roofless medieval chancel beside a working 19th-century nave; you collect a €1 key from the town hall to get inside.

The second group runs along the Hook Peninsula and the coast to the east. Tintern Abbey at Saltmills still has its nave, tower and cloister, and one ticket covers the ruin and the restored Colclough Walled Garden, with five free woodland and coastal trails starting at the door. Loftus Hall has been shut inside since 2020, so what is on offer there is the walled gardens and the house seen from the road. Bannow wants low water, when the bay pulls back below the roofless nave of St Mary’s.

Wexford Town gives you two on foot, Selskar Abbey and the Westgate Tower beside it, though Selskar’s interior opens only on volunteer-led tours through the summer into September. St Aidan’s Cathedral in Enniscorthy is the one that pulls inland and north.