Graveyard, Reisk, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Burial Grounds
What catches the attention at Reisk is not the ruin itself but something sitting quietly inside the graveyard: a circular font carved from conglomerate, a sedimentary rock made up of rounded pebbles bound together in a natural matrix, giving it a roughened, almost cobbled surface quite unlike the cut limestone you might expect. Fonts of this kind were used for baptism, and finding one still in situ within a small rural enclosure in County Waterford gives the site an intimate, slightly unexpected quality.
The church and its surrounding graveyard occupy a broad, low hill in the valley of the Ballymoat stream, which runs from south to north through the landscape. The graveyard itself is roughly square, measuring approximately forty metres on each side, and is defined by a stone-faced earthen bank, a common form of ecclesiastical enclosure in early and medieval Ireland. The Reverend P. Power, writing in 1895 in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, documented the site among the ancient ruined churches of the county, and his account remains a useful early record of what was there at the end of the nineteenth century.