Graveyard, Templemichael, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Templemichael, Co. Wicklow

At Templemichael in County Wicklow, the dead have been buried beside the ruins of something older for centuries, and the boundary that separates the graveyard from the surrounding land carries its own quiet history.

The enclosure is D-shaped, roughly 42 metres by 39 metres, defined by an earth and stone bank with an external facing of drystone walling. That combination of materials, earthen core with a stone face, is a common feature of early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where the boundary was often as significant as the buildings within it, marking the distinction between sacred and secular ground.

Somewhere inside that enclosure, a rectangular structure once stood. What survives is little more than a low stony bank, approximately 15.5 metres east to west and 7 metres north to south, with a width of two and a half to three metres and a height of only half a metre. The name Templemichael itself offers a clue: "temple" in Irish place names typically derives from the Irish "teampall", meaning church, suggesting this structure was once a place of worship dedicated to St Michael. The building has not fared well over time, its fabric reduced to a barely perceptible outline on a gentle south-east facing slope. Mid-eighteenth century headstones are present among the graves, and the graveyard continues to receive burials today, meaning the site exists simultaneously as an active place of mourning and as an archaeological remnant whose origins predate the oldest readable stone by a considerable margin.

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