Graveyard, Taghshinny, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
The oval outline of this graveyard in Taghshinny, County Longford, is itself a clue to something older.
Oval or curvilinear enclosures of this kind are frequently associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where the boundary of a sacred precinct was laid out long before any stone building stood within it. Here, the enclosing wall traces a footprint roughly 65 metres on its longer axis and 45 metres across, a shape that has likely defined this ground for well over a thousand years.
At the centre of the enclosure stands an eighteenth-century Church of Ireland building, which may have been raised on or very close to the site of its medieval predecessor. That layering of one religious structure upon another was common practice, the newer congregation inheriting both the consecrated ground and, in some cases, the very foundations of what came before. The surviving stonework makes the depth of that inheritance tangible. Inside the church is a seventeenth-century graveslab, while the graveyard itself contains a cross-slab, fragments of a second cross-slab, and two further seventeenth-century graveslabs. Cross-slabs are flat stones incised with a cross, often early medieval in character, and their presence here suggests activity on this site stretching back considerably further than the post-Reformation memorials that dominate the graveyard's visible record. The headstones and memorials that are most easily read date to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but they share the ground with carved stone that is centuries older.
Access is from the south-west, through a wrought-iron gate with a stile alongside it. The cross-slab fragments and graveslabs are the details worth looking for slowly, as they can be easy to overlook among the more upright and legible later memorials.