Grave Yard, Kilballykeefe, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Kilballykeefe, Co. Kilkenny

At the edge of a public road in County Kilkenny, four stone steps rise out of a boundary wall and lead, almost without announcement, into a raised graveyard.

The elevation is not incidental; the site sits on a west-facing slope with open views stretching to the west, north, and north-east, and the D-shaped enclosure, roughly 30 metres east to west and 20 metres north to south, has the quality of a place that has been quietly accumulating the dead for a very long time.

At the north-eastern end of the enclosure stands a medieval church, and it is the church that gives the graveyard its oldest layer of meaning. The headstones that fill most of the space date predominantly from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting continuous use across that period. Writing in 1893, a commentator named Holahan noted that some interments were still being made there at that time, and the surviving stones bear this out. Towards the south-west of the church, however, there is a scattering of uninscribed grave markers, plain and unlettered, representing burials that predate the era of named commemoration or simply belonged to those for whom a carved stone was never a possibility.

The graveyard is accessible directly from the road, and the four steps projecting from the outer wall are the only formality of entry. Once inside, the contrast between the inscribed headstones of the Georgian and Victorian periods and the anonymous markers further west gives the site an unusually legible stratigraphy, one where different centuries of burial practice occupy the same small enclosure without quite merging into one another.

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