FitzStephen's three ships
The first of May, 1169
Robert FitzStephen sailed from Milford Haven in early May 1169 in three ships, with about thirty knights, sixty men-at-arms and three hundred Welsh archers. They beached at Bannow Bay and were met the next morning by Maurice de Prendergast with another ten knights and sixty archers. Diarmait Mac Murchada, deposed king of Leinster, joined them with five hundred Irish soldiers and within the week they had taken Wexford town. Strongbow himself didn't arrive for another year. But this was the moment - the small landing on a quiet bay that ended up in every Irish history book ever written.
Medieval Bannow
The town that the sand took
After the conquest a Norman town grew on the headland inside the bay - six streets of thatched houses around St Mary's Church, a small castle, a port sheltered behind the dunes. It traded with Bristol and Wales for a hundred and fifty years. Then the Black Death arrived in 1348 on a merchant ship, the way it arrived everywhere on the western seaboard, and a port town like Bannow was hit harder than the inland villages. The harbour was silting at the same time. The dunes were creeping. By the 17th century the place was abandoned. The sand kept coming until what had been an island was a peninsula.
A church on high ground
Why St Mary's still stands
Of the entire medieval town of Bannow, one building survives - St Mary's Church, 13th-century, Romanesque doorway, crenellated wall-tops because in 1200s Wexford a parish church was also a place to take cover. It survived because it was built thirty feet above the surrounding ground, on rock the dunes could not bury. Walk out to it now and you walk past where the streets used to be. There is no signage to tell you. There is only the church, the wind off the bay, and the sea on three sides where there once was a town.