Site of Graveyard, Westaston Demesne, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Site of Graveyard, Westaston Demesne, Co. Wicklow

On the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map of County Wicklow, a circular enclosure is clearly marked to the east of Westaston House, labelled simply "Site of Grave Yard".

By the time those cartographers were recording it, the enclosure had already been gone for two years, levelled in 1836, most likely as part of the tidying and improvement of the surrounding demesne parkland. What the map preserves, then, is not a living place but the memory of one, a ghost outline on paper where something considerably older once stood.

The circular form of the enclosure is itself suggestive. In Ireland, early medieval ecclesiastical sites were frequently defined by a roughly circular boundary, and the Kilmacurragh townland in which Westaston sits has documentary roots that push back well before the Norman period. A reference in the Crede Mihi, a medieval Dublin diocesan register, records a rector at Kilmacurragh prior to 1275, which points to an established church presence in the area at least by the mid-thirteenth century, and possibly considerably earlier. The scholar M. V. Ronan noted this connection in 1928. Whether the levelled enclosure represents the remains of that early church's burial ground, or something later built on top of an older foundation, cannot now be determined with certainty, but the coincidence of location and form is compelling enough to take seriously.

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