Burial ground, Oldabbey, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
In a pasture outside Limerick, within the formal grounds of Old Abbey House, lies a patch of ground that does not appear on any Ordnance Survey map and leaves no visible mark on the modern landscape.
Yet in 1901, when soil was being disturbed there, the remains of roughly fifteen people were found buried at a shallow depth of about two feet, their bones spread across a quiet plot that had, in all likelihood, been receiving the dead long before any Christian foundation was ever raised nearby.
The discovery was recorded by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp, whose account was published in Wardell's 1904 survey of the area. Westropp labelled the location Site G on his plan of the site. The first skeleton uncovered lay on its back, oriented north to south, in alignment with a nearby cist, a pre-Christian stone-lined grave, which sits about fifteen metres to the northwest. The bones, still in their natural order, suggested a large adult male. The skull was well preserved but fragmented when handled. The teeth, Westropp noted, were nearly perfect though heavily worn, a detail that speaks quietly to a life of coarse diet or sustained physical labour. To the south of this primary burial, the bones of what appeared to be children lay in no particular arrangement, as though moved or disturbed at some earlier point. The proximity to the Augustinian nunnery of Monasternagalliaghduff, which stands about eighty metres to the southeast, raises the question of whether this ground predates the medieval religious community entirely. Westropp himself thought it possible that the plot had once served as a place of pagan burial.
The site sits within what are now the private grounds of Old Abbey House, and there is nothing on the surface to indicate anything lies beneath. A Google Earth image taken in April 2015 shows no trace whatsoever. Visitors to the wider area who have an interest in the Augustinian nunnery of Monasternagalliaghduff should be aware that Site G is a distinct and separate feature, unrelated to the ecclesiastical remains, and that its boundaries and full extent were never formally excavated or mapped with precision.