Graveyard, Kilmacoo, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilmacoo, Co. Wicklow

At the foot of an east-facing slope in County Wicklow, a rectangular patch of ground sits roughly half a metre above the surrounding fields, scattered with boulders and tree stumps.

It is the kind of place that registers as odd before you can quite say why, and the reason becomes clear only when you know what once stood here: a church and graveyard that have largely dissolved back into the landscape, leaving almost nothing to mark what they were.

By 1838, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map of the area, the site was already recorded simply as a "Site of Church, Graveyard", suggesting the church had fallen long before the surveyors arrived. What remains above ground amounts to a granite sill, possibly from a window, and a fragment of bevelled window arch, the kind of dressed stonework that would once have framed light into a small nave. More intriguing is a bullaun stone, measuring roughly 0.4 metres in each dimension, that survives among the undergrowth. A bullaun is a boulder or rock with one or more deliberately hollowed depressions, associated in Ireland with early Christian sites and sometimes used for grinding or ritual purposes. The landowner has reported the presence of several additional bullauns on the site, though none beyond the recorded one have been independently confirmed. A graveslab noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928 has since vanished entirely, leaving no trace.

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Pete F
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