Grave Yard, Ullard, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
Along the east-facing slope outside Graiguenamanagh in County Kilkenny, a medieval church shares its graveyard with what was once a handball alley.
The alley was built directly onto the east end of the church, a detail recorded as early as the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839, and it consumes most of the graveyard ground east of the building. It is a collision of uses that feels almost matter-of-fact in the Irish rural tradition, where sacred and secular space have long rubbed shoulders, but it remains a quietly startling thing to encounter.
The site at Ullard is layered in ways that reward a slow look around. The medieval church occupies the centre of a roughly trapezoidal enclosure, bounded by a dry stone wall of rough granite boulders, widest at the southwest end at around thirty-one metres and narrowing to about fifteen metres at the northeast. Immediately southeast of the handball alley stands a high cross, one of those free-standing carved stone crosses that mark early Christian sites across Ireland. Within the graveyard, south of the west end of the church, there is also a cross-slab, a flat stone bearing an incised or relief cross, simpler in form than a high cross but often equally ancient. Most of the readable headstones, dating from the eighteenth century onwards, are gathered to the south and west of the church, and the graveyard is still in use for burials today. Beyond the enclosing wall, the immediate landscape adds further depth: two bullaun stones, boulders with deliberately hollowed cup-like depressions whose precise ritual or practical purpose remains debated by scholars, lie about fifty metres to the north and fifty-two metres to the north-northwest respectively. A holy well sits seventy metres to the north, completing a cluster of monuments that suggests continuous sacred use of this ground across many centuries.