Burial, Killaree, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Sites
When quarry workers broke into gravel deposits at Killaree in County Kilkenny in 1971, they uncovered something that had lain undisturbed for well over a thousand years: a series of human burials, laid out in neat east-west rows, interred without stone linings in the earth itself.
The east-west orientation is typical of early Christian burial practice, aligning the dead to face the rising sun and, by theological extension, the direction of resurrection. By the time anyone could properly record what had been found, the site was already severely disturbed, and the exact number of individuals buried there could not be determined.
Radiocarbon dating of a sample of the human remains placed the burials in the period AD 550 to 657, a range that situates them firmly in early medieval Ireland, a period of active monastery-building and the gradual Christianisation of the Irish countryside. Among the objects recovered were an iron knife and a decorated whetstone, modest but telling grave goods that suggest these were not anonymous pauper burials but the interments of people whose community still marked their passing with personal possessions. The site does not stand in isolation. Roughly 300 metres to the south lies Black Castle, and approximately the same distance to the north-east are the remains of a church and an ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of boundary, often a curving bank or ditch, that would have defined the sacred precinct of an early monastic or church site. The proximity of these features to one another points to a cluster of early medieval activity in this stretch of Kilkenny landscape, of which the burial ground was almost certainly a part.