Grave Yard, Aglish, Co. Waterford

Somewhere between the late seventeenth century and whenever someone last looked carefully, a graveslab, an octagonal font, and a cross fragment recorded at the churchyard of Aglish in County Waterford simply vanished. They were catalogued by the Reverend Patrick Power in 1938, and by the time anyone went back to check, they were gone. What remains is a quieter puzzle: a subrectangular graveyard, roughly 55 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, enclosing the ruins of the parish church on low, level ground near the Goish stream. The boundary itself is a mixture of a stone-clad earthen bank on the eastern side and masonry walls elsewhere, a modest but telling detail suggesting the enclosure was built up in stages or from different materials as need and resources allowed.

Revd Power, writing across two separate publications in 1898 and 1938, was the principal recorder of what was once here and what was already disappearing. Three crudely decorated headstones he mentioned, probably eighteenth century in date, survive close to the southern perimeter, their decoration rough enough to suggest local rather than professional craftsmanship. Inside the northern gateway stands a small stone block, 28 centimetres square and 42 centimetres high, with pyramid-shaped stops at its base. Power described it as a font, but it is more likely the base of the stem of an octagonal wayside cross, the kind of free-standing stone cross once common along roads and at parish boundaries in medieval Ireland. Two fragments of a pointed, chamfered doorway, the style typical of medieval ecclesiastical stonework, lie near the south-eastern and south-western perimeters, presumably displaced from the church itself at some point. They sit there in the grass with no particular drama, pieces of an architectural context that no longer exists around them.