Churchyard, Tyfarnham, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Grounds
In a field in Co. Westmeath, a chapel that appeared perfectly intact on a nineteenth-century map has since been swallowed almost entirely by the earth.
By 2011, aerial photography revealed nothing of it but grass-covered wall footings and the faint cropmark of a D-shaped churchyard enclosure, the kind of ghost outline that only shows clearly from the air under the right conditions of drought or low-angle light.
The chapel was still standing and annotated as such on the 1837 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, positioned in the western quadrant of that roughly D-shaped churchyard. But the story it sits within is older and more layered. The 1654 to 1656 Down Survey, a vast Cromwellian-era mapping project that recorded land ownership across Ireland in the wake of conquest and plantation, depicted the chapel alongside a neighbouring building in the parish of Tyfarnan. The accompanying terrier, a written register describing parish contents, noted that situated within the parish were both the Hall and Church of Tyfarnham. That Hall may itself survive, in a sense: a rectangular earthwork 155 metres to the south of the chapel site is a candidate for its remains. The field around the levelled chapel is scattered with further earthworks that may represent a clustered settlement, a pattern of occupation that has largely dissolved into the ground but left its signature in the lumps and hollows of the soil. Immediately south of the church, a curving linear earthwork may mark the course of a sunken way or old roadway, the kind of hollowed track worn down over generations of foot and cart traffic before it too was abandoned.