Burial Ground, Grallagh, Co. Waterford
A shallow depression in a pasture field near Grallagh, roughly 26 metres across, is almost all that remains visible of what was once a burial ground associated with an early church. There are no headstones, no walls still standing, no obvious sign to a passing walker that the slightly sunken ground beneath their feet marks something that was, at one point, deliberately set apart from the surrounding landscape. The site sits towards the top of a gentle north-west-facing slope, with the Lickey river running east to west about 500 metres to the north.
The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a D-shaped enclosure, roughly 35 metres on its longer axis and 30 metres on the shorter, defined by field banks. The straight side of the D fell along the north-west. By the time anyone came to look at the site in person, those banks had largely merged back into the field boundaries around them, leaving only the dished interior as evidence of the enclosure's former shape. The place-name, however, preserved what the landscape had lost. In Irish it was known as Páirc na Cille, meaning the field of the church, a phrase recorded by the Waterford scholar Reverend P. Power in his study of the placenames of the Decies, the old territorial region of west and south Waterford, first compiled in the mid-twentieth century. The cill element in Irish placenames typically points to an early ecclesiastical site, often a small pre-Norman church or monastic cell, and its survival here suggests local memory of the site's sacred function persisted long after any physical structure had vanished.