Graveyard, Castletown, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Castletown, Co. Limerick

A working graveyard that has quietly accumulated eight centuries of history beneath its feet might not seem unusual, but what archaeology turned up at Castletown says something unexpected about the ground people have been burying their dead in.

When excavations described by McCutcheon in 2003 examined the site, they found evidence not just of the dead but of industry: a shallow pit measuring up to 10.5 metres by 6.3 metres, filled at its base with carbonised silt, with stake-holes, gullies, and stone flags suggesting a kiln or furnace of some kind. The underlying boulder clay showed signs of burning in place, and the stake-holes may have supported a roof or a wind block. Whatever this structure was, it predates the current boundary wall by at least a century, and its presence underneath what is now a maintained parish graveyard gives the place an unexpectedly layered quality.

The graveyard sits on the eastern side of an avenue within the precinct of a medieval borough, and its trapezoidal shape, roughly 70 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, is enclosed by a stone wall that was only newly constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Before that, the boundary was a man-made earthen bank, and the first-edition Ordnance Survey map records a noticeably more angular northern boundary than the one visitors see today. The headstones are numerous, the earliest noted dating to the 1790s, though there are no chest tombs among them. Inside the western end of the ruined medieval parish church that stands near the northern edge of the graveyard, the Conyers family have their burial vaults, a more private arrangement within an already ancient structure. Stone settings on the western side of the excavated area may have formed part of a cobbled path that once led through the fields to that same church.

The gate and stile are located at the western end of the northern wall, which is the practical point of entry. The graveyard remains in active use and is maintained, so it is accessible in the ordinary way. The ruined church is worth approaching closely; the Conyers vaults sit within its western end, and the fabric of the ruin gives some sense of the medieval borough context the whole site sits within. There is nothing showy about the place, but the combination of post-medieval headstones, a ruined parish church, family vaults, an early earthen enclosure, and the remains of what may have been an eighteenth-century industrial feature beneath it all makes Castletown graveyard considerably more than its tidy boundary wall suggests.

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