Grave Yard, Grange, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Grange, Co. Wexford

On a gentle west-facing slope near Grange in County Wexford, there is a patch of ground that has been called a graveyard for at least two centuries, yet shows no headstones, no grave markers, and no visible sign that anyone was ever buried there.

The ground simply rises in a low, subcircular mound, roughly eighteen metres across, edged by a slight scarp no higher than about half a metre to three-quarters of a metre, with a few small trees growing on it. That is all. No cross, no enclosing wall, no hollow in the earth where a coffin might once have settled.

What makes the site quietly puzzling is the disagreement between the two earliest maps that record it. The 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map shows it as a rectangular feature, approximately twenty-five metres east to west and twenty metres north to south. By the time the 1925 edition was produced, the same feature had been mapped as circular, with a diameter of around twenty metres. Both editions label it a graveyard, but the shift in shape between the two surveys raises a question that neither answers: were the cartographers interpreting the same physical reality differently, or had the ground itself changed in the intervening decades? It is also possible that the mounded, scarped form of the site led earlier surveyors to assume a funerary function that may not be warranted. Such raised, roughly circular enclosures in Ireland sometimes turn out to be the remains of a rath, a ringfort used as a farmstead in the early medieval period, though nothing in the available record confirms that interpretation here either.

At ground level today, the site offers only the mound itself, the low scarp defining its edge, and those few trees. Whatever lies beneath, if anything does, remains unexcavated and unconfirmed.

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Pete F
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