Graveyard, Moydow Glebe, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
In the fabric of this small County Longford graveyard, a piece of a late-medieval window sill has been pressed into service as a grave-marker.
The repurposing is quiet and easy to miss, but it speaks to a layering of time that gives the site an unusual character: building material from an older church becoming, centuries later, a marker for the dead in the same ground.
The graveyard at Moydow Glebe is irregularly shaped, roughly 53 metres east to west and 52 metres north to south, enclosed by a stone wall and entered through a wrought-iron gate at the north-east. The Church of Ireland building that stands in the northern sector dates from the 19th century, but the site is considered possibly associated with an earlier church, and the recycled window sill fragment supports that suggestion. Memorials span from the late 17th century through to the 20th, giving the ground an unusually long run of legible history for a rural parish site. In the southern half, a fragment of a stone cross is also visible, worn but present, the kind of survival that tends to go unnoticed without some prior knowledge of where to look.

