Grave Yard, Granardkill, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Granardkill, Co. Longford

Set into the boundary wall of this graveyard in Granardkill, just beside the entrance gate, are fragments of round-headed windows that have been quietly recycled from buildings that no longer exist.

At least one of them is thought to come from a medieval parish church once associated with this site; the others are likely salvaged from a Roman Catholic chapel that stood at the south-western end of the graveyard and was visible on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837. The chapel is long gone, but pieces of its architecture have been mortared into the perimeter wall, preserved not as a formal memorial but simply as useful stone.

The graveyard itself is an irregular, elongated enclosure stretching roughly 230 metres on its north-east to south-west axis and between 40 and 70 metres wide. A stone wall runs along the roadside to the north, while the remaining boundaries are a patchwork of hedging, concrete walls, and mesh-wire fencing. Despite this, the site has a formal consecration on record: a plaque notes that it was consecrated on the 29th September 1826 by the Reverend Doctor McGauran, Bishop of Ardagh. The Diocese of Ardagh, one of the older ecclesiastical divisions in the Irish midlands, has roots reaching back to the early medieval period, so McGauran's act of consecration was in one sense a modern administrative step layered over ground with a far longer religious history.

The window fragments near the entrance are worth pausing over. Round-headed windows of the kind typically associated with Romanesque or early Gothic church architecture are not uncommon finds in Irish graveyards where a medieval church once stood, but to see them literally built into a wall rather than left as freestanding ruins gives this site a slightly different quality. The ground holds the remains of at least two phases of church building, and the wall, almost incidentally, holds the evidence.

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