Brideswell Grave Yard, Brideswell Big, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Brideswell Grave Yard, Brideswell Big, Co. Wexford

A triangular graveyard is already an unusual thing.

Most burial grounds follow roughly rectangular or oval outlines, conforming to field boundaries or the curve of a church precinct. This one, on a gentle north-west-facing slope in County Wexford, comes to a blunt point at its north-east end, defined by an earth and stone bank, and measures roughly 40 metres along its longer axis. Only two 19th-century gravestones survive within it. What makes the place stranger still is a fragment of a bullaun stone, a piece of granite no larger than a dinner plate, preserving the base of a shallow basin carved into its upper face. Bullaun stones, found at early Christian and pre-Christian sites across Ireland, are roughly cup-marked boulders whose original function remains debated; they may have served ritual, grinding, or votive purposes. The fragment here is modest in scale, perhaps 35 centimetres by 30, with a basin just under 17 centimetres across and 4 centimetres deep, but its presence suggests the site has a longer history than its Victorian headstones imply.

The graveyard appears by name on the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, recorded as Brideswell Grave Yard, and then as Brideswell Burial Ground on the 1940 edition. The name itself points towards the wider complex of which this burial ground forms a part. Roughly 150 metres to the north-west lies Bride's Well, a holy well associated with Saint Brigid, and immediately beside it are the remains of conjoined masonry circular huts. The pairing of a holy well with small stone structures and a nearby burial ground is a recognisable pattern in the Irish early medieval landscape, where places of water, prayer, and the dead were drawn into proximity. Archaeological testing carried out on several occasions around the graveyard, to the west, east, and north-east, produced no related material, which leaves the chronology of the site open. The earth and stone bank that gives the enclosure its triangular form has not been securely dated, and the bullaun fragment, displaced from its original setting, offers no easy answers.

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