Burial ground, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

At the base of a stream valley in County Wicklow, a tiny square enclosure barely six metres across sits on a natural rise in the ground, its walls of uncoursed stone so low and worn that nothing is visible at ground level.

You could walk past it without a second glance. Yet this modest plot once held a small collection of early medieval stonework that quietly attests to centuries of Christian burial and devotion in what must have been a very local, very particular corner of early Ireland.

The enclosure, entered through a gap of roughly 1.2 metres on its eastern side, yielded several carved stones when investigated and recorded by Kilbride-Jones in 1939. Among them were a cross-inscribed graveslab, possibly laid over a long cist burial, a type of grave formed by lining a pit with flat stones to create a narrow stone-lined box, along with a fragment of a second slab. Two simple granite crosses were also found here, one of them bearing a small incised Latin cross. That piece has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin for safekeeping. The cross-inscribed slabs, common in early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites from roughly the sixth to the twelfth century, were often placed directly over burials as markers combining Christian symbolism with the practical purpose of identifying a grave. The find assemblage, modest as it is, suggests this was a functioning early Christian burial ground, probably associated with a local community or a minor ecclesiastical presence long since vanished from the landscape.

The site offers little to see on the ground today, the walls having sunk below the surface and the most significant carved stone now housed elsewhere. Its interest lies less in what survives in situ than in what was once concentrated in such a small, carefully defined space on that low rise above the stream.

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