Old Grave Yard, Kilpatrick, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Grounds
In a small, roughly triangular field in County Westmeath, enclosed by a stone wall that appears to date from the nineteenth century, there is a graveyard with no visible graves.
No tombstones break the uneven ground inside, no church ruins suggest why people were once buried here, and nothing marks the site as anything other than a slightly lumpy patch of rushy pasture. Yet the enclosure is clearly deliberate, its boundary wall intact, its entrance still accessible by a stile near the north-western corner.
When the site was visited and recorded in 1980, the description was matter-of-fact about what was absent rather than what was present. What survives around the perimeter, however, is quietly layered. To the south runs a canal, and to the east lies a double bank and a fosse, which is a broad, deliberately dug ditch, a form of earthwork associated with much older boundary-making traditions than the nineteenth-century wall it now accompanies. An old roadway follows the western and north-western edges of the enclosure. These features suggest the graveyard occupies, or perhaps respects, an older arrangement in the landscape, one whose origins are no longer legible from the surface. The place-name Kilpatrick itself carries the prefix "cill", the Irish word for a church or early ecclesiastical enclosure, which hints that religious use of this ground may stretch back considerably further than the existing stonework implies, even if nothing of that earlier phase now shows above the turf.