Burial ground, Urlish, Co. Monaghan
Co. Monaghan |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Urlish in County Monaghan, in a shallow dip between two higher points of ground, there is a field that local people have long called the graveyard field.
Bones have been found there. Beyond that, the record goes quiet.
The site sits in a slight col, the low saddle-shaped pass between two rises that farmers and travellers have used as natural routes for centuries. When the antiquarian Oliver Davies visited as part of the Irish Tourist Association Survey in 1940, he described what he found as a small square enclosure. Earlier, J.B. Leslie had noted it in 1929. Neither account turned up any trace of a structure, no wall foundations, no marked stones, nothing to suggest a chapel or formal burial building of any kind. The precise location within the townland has not been established with certainty. What remains is the field name itself, which in rural Ireland has often proved a more durable form of memory than any monument. Local place-names carrying words like "graveyard" or "killeen" frequently point to early Christian burial grounds or to informal cillíní, small enclosures used to inter unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground. Whether that is the case here is unknown. The bones were found; the name stuck; the explanation did not survive.