Burying Ground, Ballynacliffy, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Burying Ground, Ballynacliffy, Co. Westmeath

A burial ground that has quietly changed its own shape over two centuries sits on the boundary line between the townlands of Coolaleena and Littletown in County Westmeath.

What makes it unusual is not its age but its geometry: early maps show a circular enclosure, while the site on the ground today is broadly square, enclosed by a stone wall with an entrance gate at the eastern end of the north wall. The shift from circle to square is not merely a cartographic curiosity; it reflects something real about how the site was reshaped across time, and the earlier form has not entirely disappeared.

The place is named Killeenaglina Burying Ground, as annotated on the 1837 Ordnance Survey Fair Plan map, where it appears as a small circular enclosure marked by a broken line. By the time of Larkin's 1808 map of County Westmeath, something at this location was already noted simply as a 'Ruin', suggesting the site had fallen into a condition that cartographers found worth marking but difficult to classify. The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map still records it as circular, but the revised edition of 1912 depicts a square-shaped burial ground, reflecting changes that had occurred in the intervening decades. The present enclosure measures approximately 29 metres north to south and 27 metres east to west. Crucially, the ghost of the original boundary survives: a roughly circular scarp, visible to the north and west of the current stone wall, marks the line of the earlier, larger earthen enclosure. Circular burial grounds of this kind in Ireland are often associated with early ecclesiastical sites, where the rounded boundary, known in the literature as a rath-style or cashel-type enclosure, pre-dates later medieval or post-medieval reorganisation of the space. The memorials within the present ground date from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, but the earthwork beneath and around them is considerably older in character.

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