Graveyard, Stangs, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Stangs, Co. Kilkenny

At the eastern edge of Gowran in Co. Kilkenny, where the roads to Bagnalstown and Goresbridge split apart, there is a triangular wedge of ground enclosed by a stone wall on two sides and, at its narrower end, a row of chains strung between bollards.

There are no headstones, no grave-markers, no inscription of any kind to suggest what lies beneath. What the ground contains only became apparent during a thunderstorm sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, when a number of trees were uprooted and skeletons were exposed underneath.

The site sits roughly fifty metres north-east of what was once the Magdalen Gate, the eastern entrance to Gowran's medieval town wall. Just outside that gate stood a Magdalen hospital, one of the charitable institutions of the medieval period typically dedicated to the care of the sick or poor, and often associated with a small chapel. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan recorded that around 1840 the physical remains of the chapel attached to this hospital were cleared away and trees were planted over the site. The precise location, he noted, was the angle formed by those same two diverging roads, opposite the pike house, a toll-collecting point that would once have stood at the road junction. By 1900, the Ordnance Survey was marking the ground simply as "Church (Site of)", a designation that acknowledged something had once been there without specifying what. The triangular area measures approximately sixty metres along its longest axis, with a maximum width of around forty-three metres at its north-eastern end, and the scrub and trees that fill its wider portion are, in a sense, the direct descendants of the deliberate planting that followed the chapel's demolition. The burials beneath them are presumably those of people associated with the medieval hospital, though nothing above ground now says so.

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