Burial Ground, Kill St. Nicholas, Co. Waterford

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Kill St. Nicholas, Co. Waterford

On a west-facing slope in County Waterford, there is a parish church and graveyard that exists now only as a cartographic memory. The church of Kill St Nicholas and its surrounding burial ground were clearly recorded on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, shown as a D-shaped enclosure roughly fifty metres across from east-northeast to west-southwest and about twenty-five metres in the perpendicular direction, its southern edge cut off by a field bank. Today, neither church nor graveyard boundary is evident on the ground.

The place-name itself carries an early ecclesiastical signature. "Kill" derives from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, and the dedication to St Nicholas points to a parish with medieval roots. The Reverend P. Power, writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland in 1890 and 1891 in his survey of the ancient ruined churches of County Waterford, noted the site among those that had effectively vanished from the landscape. By the time the Victorian cartographers captured it in ink, it was already a remnant; a generation or two later, even that remnant had gone, absorbed into the agricultural field system that surrounds it on the ridge.

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