Burying Ground, Killeen, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Burying Ground, Killeen, Co. Kilkenny

In a pasture field in Killeen, County Kilkenny, people were buried, and the ground has kept that secret ever since.

There are no headstones, no enclosing wall, no visible earthwork of any kind. Walk the field today and nothing announces itself. Yet the dead are recorded here, their resting place acknowledged, if only by a name written on a map.

The source for what we know is the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, which marks the words "Burying ground" within a specific field, roughly 110 metres east to west and narrowing from about 90 metres at its western end to around 60 metres at the east. The cartographers noted no enclosing feature, no chapel ruin, no accompanying structure of any kind. The field itself sits at a boundary junction, with a combined townland and parish boundary running along its southern edge and the townland boundary continuing along the eastern side, where a public road passes. That positioning at the meeting of administrative and ecclesiastical borders is characteristic of certain early or informal burial places in Ireland, sometimes associated with unbaptised children or pre-Christian communities, though no such specific designation is recorded here. Whatever the nature or age of the burials, the 1839 surveyors considered the place significant enough to name, even in the absence of anything they could draw.

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