Grave Yard, Oldcarton, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Oldcarton, Co. Kildare

Tucked into open pasture beside the edge of Carton Demesne in County Kildare, this small, triangular graveyard holds more questions than its modest dimensions suggest. The enclosing mortared stone wall, running roughly 55 metres north to south and 45 metres east to west, contains a blocked stone arch on its western side, just south of the entrance gate, measuring 2.5 metres wide and only half a metre high. Nobody is entirely certain what it was for. The ruined church in the northern sector of the enclosure still stands in fragmentary form, and the site has also been identified as a possible nunnery, though the evidence for that remains tentative.

The graveyard's legible burial markers run from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and the site is no longer in active use. Its more elusive feature is a carved eighteenth-century burial slab, noted in the Ordnance Survey Letters by Herity in 2002, which described a tombstone bearing ornamental carving and figures of animals. Lord Walter Fitzgerald examined it more closely between 1903 and 1905 and recorded it in some detail, identifying it as an eighteenth-century piece. Where that slab is now, nobody knows for certain; its exact location within or around the site has been lost.

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