Graveyard, Ardunsaghan, Co. Leitrim
Co. Leitrim |
Burial Grounds
In a small graveyard in Ardunsaghan, County Leitrim, the most substantial thing left of what was once a Roman Catholic church is a single fragment of wall.
The rest has gone entirely, absorbed back into the landscape of a south-facing slope that runs down toward the bank of a small stream. The walled enclosure around it, a rectangle roughly 36 metres by 26 metres, outlasted the building it was meant to serve by the better part of two centuries.
The church was already derelict by 1838, according to the historian Gallogly, writing in the 1990s. That date places its abandonment somewhere in the decades before or around Catholic Emancipation, a period when many rural parish churches across Ireland were either falling out of use or being replaced by newer structures as congregations reorganised and expanded. Whatever the local circumstances in Ardunsaghan, the building did not survive. The graveyard did, and continued to be used long after the church had crumbled. The headstones that remain are relatively modern, dating from around 1900 through to approximately 1987, which means the community went on burying its dead here well into living memory, in an enclosure entered through a gateway flanked by substantial masonry piers on the northern side.