Grave Yard, Gorteenara, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Gorteenara, Co. Kilkenny

On a low hill amid rolling County Kilkenny pasture, this small graveyard carries a quiet contradiction at its centre: local tradition holds that famine victims and unbaptised children were buried here, a category of burial usually associated with unmarked plots on unconsecrated ground, yet grave-markers do exist.

Whatever the full story of those interments, the site itself layers several distinct histories on top of one another, each partially obscuring what came before.

The sub-triangular enclosure, roughly 49 metres east to west and 53 metres north to south, sits within an earth and stone boundary bank that still rises to over a metre in places, most legibly along the northern, eastern, and south-western stretches. The graveyard itself overlies an earlier enclosure, suggesting the site was considered significant long before the medieval period. A medieval parish church stands in the north-eastern sector, adding another stratum to the sequence. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the situation, the ground had become something rather more exclusive: a private burial ground for the Brenan family of Bagnellstown, a town previously known as Eden Hall. The headstones and two table tombs that survive date from the mid-nineteenth century, making them relatively recent features on a site whose use almost certainly stretches back many centuries. A table tomb, to distinguish it from a simple headstone, is a flat slab raised on stone supports, resembling a table, and was typically reserved for families of some local standing.

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