Ecclesiastical enclosure, Kilkenny Abbey, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Ecclesiastical Sites
A ruined Church of Ireland church sits in the northern quadrant of a graveyard in Kilkenny Abbey, Co. Westmeath, and while the building itself dates to the nineteenth century, the shape of the ground it occupies may be pointing to something considerably older.
The graveyard's boundary wall traces a sub-rectangular, roughly quadrantal outline, and it is precisely this form that has led researchers to propose the site as the location of an Early Christian ecclesiastical enclosure. These enclosures, the curving or near-circular boundaries that once defined the sacred space of early Irish monastic and church sites, often left their imprint on the landscape long after the original structures vanished, surviving in the outlines of later graveyards and field boundaries.
The nineteenth-century church itself is now disused and in a ruinous condition, and it may well have been built on the footprint of a medieval parish church that preceded it on the same ground. Within the graveyard, to the south-east of the church, a small rectangular chapel also survives. The layering here is typical of Irish ecclesiastical sites, where early medieval activity attracted successive phases of Christian use over centuries, each generation building on or beside what came before. The quadrantal graveyard form as an indicator of Early Christian enclosure was identified by Swan in 1988, whose work drew attention to how these landscape signatures could be read even where no upstanding early medieval fabric remains.