Monaster Grave Yard, Kilnahinch, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Grounds
On a low esker ridge at the southern edge of a bog in Kilnahinch, a small graveyard sits in what appears to be total anonymity.
None of its grave markers carry any inscription. The few that are visible above the grass are plain iron-ringed crosses and rough stones loosely set into the earth, while others remain buried under the sod altogether. For a place of burial, it offers almost nothing in the way of identity, either for those interred there or for the site itself.
Surveyed at intervals between 1976 and 1980, the enclosure measures roughly 21 metres by 17 metres and is bounded by what appears to be a 19th-century mortared stone wall. Within the south-eastern section of that wall, however, something older has been absorbed. A stretch of earlier masonry, standing some three to three and a half metres high and partly obscured by ivy, differs noticeably from the rest: it is thicker, set on a rough projecting plinth, and constructed in a distinctly more robust manner. Surveyors tentatively identified it as a fragment of an earlier church, though its alignment runs at an angle that does not quite fit that interpretation, and there are no dressed stones, carved details, or architectural features of any kind to confirm it. The site name, Monaster, derives from the Latin monasterium, suggesting some ecclesiastical presence in the distant past, which lends the buried wall a certain plausibility even if its true function remains unresolved. Nearby, a ruined stone and brick cottage and a quarry hollow in the ridge add further layers to a landscape that has clearly been used, abandoned, and quietly forgotten more than once.
The graveyard stands on a slight rise overlooking low, wet ground to the north and north-west, which would have made it a sensible choice for burial in a boggy townland. By the late 1970s it was already disused, the surface uneven and overgrown with long grass, with stones suspected beneath the turf that could not be confirmed as grave markers without excavation. It is a place where the evidence for what once happened there keeps just out of reach.