Graveyard, Kilcashel, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilcashel, Co. Wicklow

On a low hilltop in County Wicklow, there is a graveyard with no visible graves.

No headstones, no kerbing, no worn inscriptions; just an open oval of ground, a crumbling earthen bank, and the barely legible outline of what was once a church. The absence of markers is the thing that catches the attention first, suggesting either a site of very early date, when formal grave-markers were not commonly used, or else a place whose above-ground traces have simply vanished into the turf over centuries.

The church itself survives only as a low, jumbled bank of large stones and earth, measuring roughly thirteen metres east to west and just under six metres north to south. A gap of about one and a half metres in the southern wall, positioned slightly west of centre, is likely the original doorway. Around it, a large roughly oval enclosure stretches approximately one hundred and forty metres on its longest axis, defined by a wide earthen bank that still stands between one and two metres above the surrounding ground on its outer face. This kind of enclosure is characteristic of early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where a raised boundary, known sometimes as a cashel when built in stone or a rath-like bank when in earth, separated the sacred interior from the secular landscape beyond. The place-name Kilcashel compounds two such ideas: "cill", meaning church, and "cashel", pointing to a stone enclosure, which suggests the site may once have had more substantial boundary walling than survives today. At the north-east, a straight stretch of field wall has interrupted the original line, though the earlier boundary is thought to have curved northward at that point. A second possible enclosure lies immediately to the east, hinting that the complex may have been more extensive than what remains now readable on the ground.

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Pete F
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