Burial, Mullaghmonaghan, Co. Monaghan

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Burial Sites

Burial, Mullaghmonaghan, Co. Monaghan

Beneath or beside what became a provincial bank in Mullaghmonaghan, Co. Monaghan, monks are said to lie buried.

The ground has long since been built over, the holy well they were interred near has disappeared, and even the precise spot is no longer known. What survives is a single note, preserved in the Irish Folklore Commission's Schools Manuscripts collection, recording a tradition that refuses to be entirely forgotten.

The note, catalogued in the IFC Schools MSS (volume 957, page 157), states that monks from a local monastery were murdered by English soldiers and buried near a holy well that once occupied the site of the provincial bank. Two dates are given, 1540 or 1589, each falling within periods of Tudor military activity in Ulster, when monasteries across Ireland were suppressed, seized, or simply destroyed. The uncertainty between those dates is itself telling; the tradition was passed down through oral memory rather than documentary record, and oral memory preserves the fact of a thing more reliably than its precise timing. Holy wells in Ireland were often focal points for local devotion and burial, which may explain why the monks came to rest near one rather than within a formal monastic enclosure. Whether that well survived into living memory, or had already vanished before the bank was built, is not recorded.

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