Burial, Mullaghwillin, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Burial Sites
In a long, narrow field straddling the roads near Hog's Hill Bridge in County Meath, human burials and a stone mortar were uncovered during house construction, and then, essentially, forgotten.
No precise coordinates were recorded, no excavation followed, and the find slipped into local memory rather than the archaeological record. The field's name, however, preserves a clue: Cillmore Field, anglicised from the Irish "Cillmore" or "Kilmore", meaning large or great church, a name type that in Ireland commonly signals an early ecclesiastical site, often a burial ground associated with an early medieval church or chapel that has since vanished entirely from the landscape.
The Keeran River runs close by, looping around the site roughly 100 to 200 metres to the south, east, and north, marking the county boundary between Meath and Louth. That border-country position, along a river in low-lying ground, is not unusual for early Christian settlements; such liminal places, where parishes and territories met, were often chosen for small churches and their associated cemeteries. The Meath Field Names Project, which has catalogued surviving place-name evidence across the county, recorded that Cillmore Field is a long, narrow strip extending between two roads to the north-west and south-east of Hog's Hill Bridge, with the only modern structure sitting at the southern end. Beyond that, the record is silent. The stone mortar found alongside the burials adds a small, tantalising detail: stone mortars are sometimes associated with ecclesiastical or domestic use in early medieval Ireland, though without proper excavation, its significance here remains open.
