Site of Aughnakilla Burial Ground, Glenpatrick, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Burial Grounds
Some places are lost not through destruction but through simple forgetting. At Glenpatrick in County Waterford, an early ecclesiastical site sits somewhere along the western bank of a small stream, its precise location no longer known. There is nothing to see at ground level, no upstanding stonework, no hollow in the earth, no marker to orient a visitor. The burial ground simply vanished from practical memory while retaining a ghostly presence on paper.
The site appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, where it is noted only as "site of Burial Ground", suggesting that even the cartographers of that period were recording an absence rather than a presence. The scholar Reverend P. Power, in his 1952 work on the placenames of the Decies, the old territorial region covering much of County Waterford, identified it as the early church site of Aughnacilla. Early church sites of this kind were typically modest foundations, often associated with a founder saint and a small community, and many across Ireland survive only as placename traces or faint crop marks. Here, even those traces are uncertain. The ground is level, the stream runs roughly south to north, and beyond that the archaeology offers little to anchor the imagination.