Burial, Boheragaddy, Co. Kilkenny

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Burial Sites

Burial, Boheragaddy, Co. Kilkenny

A field called 'Killeen' in County Kilkenny gave up an unexpected secret in 1980, when the digging of house foundations turned the ground into an impromptu excavation.

Three adult burials came to light, the bones of two females and one male, in fairly flat terrain close to a road near Boheragaddy. There were no structural remains surrounding them, no stone-lined grave cuts, no enclosing walls, nothing to mark the spot above ground before construction began.

The field name is itself a quiet piece of evidence. Killeen, a diminutive of the Irish word cill, meaning church or monastic cell, was commonly applied in rural Ireland to small, informal burial grounds that existed outside consecrated parish graveyards. These sites were often used for the interment of unbaptised infants, or for individuals who, for whatever reason, were buried apart from the main community. Finding adult burials in such a location is less common, which makes the Boheragaddy discovery a little more unusual. The three individuals left no accompanying objects and no built structure to help explain the circumstances of their burial, leaving the site quietly ambiguous. The find is documented by Cahill and Sikora in a 2011 study of such burial types across Ireland.

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