Graveslab, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

At Kilbride in County Wicklow, on a slight natural rise where the land dips toward a stream valley, there is a burial ground that has essentially vanished from the surface.

Nothing is visible at ground level, yet beneath and around that unremarkable patch of ground lies a cluster of early medieval stonework: a cross-inscribed graveslab, a fragment of a second, and two simple granite crosses, one of them carrying a small incised Latin cross. That last piece has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland, leaving the site itself with little to show the passing eye.

The enclosure is remarkably compact, measuring roughly 5.8 metres by 6 metres, its boundary formed from an uncoursed stone wall with an entrance about 1.2 metres wide on the eastern side. Cross-inscribed graveslabs are a recognisable feature of early medieval Irish Christianity, typically flat stones carved with a cross to mark a burial, sometimes laid over a long cist, a type of stone-lined grave in which the body was placed at full length. The possibility that the main slab here covered exactly such a cist gives the site a quiet continuity with early Christian burial practice more broadly. The finds were first documented by Kilbride-Jones in 1939, and the grouping of carved stones, two slabs and two freestanding crosses within so tight an enclosure, suggests this was a place of some local devotional significance, even if its scale was always modest.

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Pete F
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