Graveyard, Narraghmore Demesne, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Burial Grounds
On the northern end of a pasture ridge in County Kildare, a walled graveyard quietly holds fragments of several different centuries at once. A medieval gargoyle, the kind of grotesque carved figure more commonly associated with cathedral rooflines, has been fixed to the west gable of a 19th-century church within the enclosure. It is an odd pairing, a piece of Gothic stonework from the Middle Ages pressed into service on a building several hundred years its junior.
The rectangular enclosure, roughly 68 metres north to south and 54 metres east to west, is bounded by a stone wall with an entrance gate on the south side. It occupies the site of a medieval church, and two significant survivals from that earlier structure remain. One is the gargoyle now mounted on the later church gable. The other is a medieval font, a stone basin used for baptism, which has been preserved on the site. The earliest legible gravestones within the enclosure date to the 18th century, though the layering of medieval stonework into a 19th-century building suggests the place has been in continuous use across a much longer span than the surviving inscriptions alone would indicate.