Grave Yard, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

On a gentle south-westward slope above the Avoca River in County Wicklow, a graveyard sits so heavily overgrown that the church once said to stand here has vanished entirely, leaving only a handful of eighteenth-century headstones and a mausoleum as evidence that this was ever a place of formal religious or civic significance.

The church was recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a series of nineteenth-century antiquarian notes compiled to accompany the early OS mapping of Ireland, but by the time modern surveyors came to look, nothing remained of the building at all. Not a foundation wall, not a dressed stone, not a threshold.

The mausoleum that does survive is dedicated to Frances Parnell, a name that carries considerable weight in the story of Irish political life. She was the mother of Charles Stewart Parnell, the land reform campaigner and nationalist parliamentarian who dominated Irish politics in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and her burial place here in Kilbride links the site to one of the most consequential families in modern Irish history. The landscape itself is quiet and unremarkable to look at, the kind of field-edge graveyard that appears on Ordnance Survey maps across rural Ireland without attracting much attention. The mausoleum, marked by name on those maps, is the one feature that distinguishes it.

The graveyard is described as heavily overgrown, which means that approaching it requires some willingness to pick through vegetation. The eighteenth-century headstones, where legible, would reward close attention, though the site's main point of interest remains the Parnell mausoleum and the curious absence where a church once reportedly stood.

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