Grave Yard, Ennisnag, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard whose boundary on one side is formed not by a wall but by a running stream is already a little out of the ordinary.
The one at Ennisnag, tucked into the south-east quadrant of a crossroads near the Kings River in County Kilkenny, stretches roughly 113 metres east to west and 36 metres north to south, with a small stream defining its north-eastern and eastern edges before flowing into the Kings River about 30 metres to the south. What the early Ordnance Survey maps from 1839 show is equally curious: at that point the graveyard appears to have had no formal enclosure at all, an openness that later mapping no longer reflects.
The site is bound up with a medieval church dedicated to St Mogue, a saint whose feast day fell on the 14th of February. The church itself did not survive the centuries intact. According to the historian Carrigan, writing in 1905, it fell into ruin shortly after the Reformation and was eventually demolished around 1820, its stones reused as building material for a Protestant church that now stands at the graveyard's western end. That kind of practical recycling of medieval fabric was common in nineteenth-century Ireland, but it gives the site a layered quality: the old church is gone, yet the ground it once served remains in use, and within it survive two medieval graveslabs. These flat, inscribed or decorated stones, laid directly over burial plots, were a common form of commemoration from the early medieval period onward, and their presence here suggests the site was of some local significance well before the Reformation brought the church's active life to a close.