Burying Ground, Outrath, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
At Outrath in County Kilkenny, a triangular graveyard sits noticeably raised above the fields around it, its ground level lifted clear of the surrounding landscape in the way that centuries of successive burials sometimes leave a site, the accumulated depth of the dead quietly lifting the earth.
The enclosure measures roughly sixty metres on its longer axis and fifty-four on the other, bounded by a stone wall and entered through a pair of square-cut limestone piers fitted with a wrought-iron gate, with a stile set into the wall just to the west for those who prefer not to unlatch it.
The graveyard's triangular shape and elevated profile suggest long use, and there was indeed a medieval church standing in its south-eastern portion, the two features, burial ground and church, existing together as a single site for generations. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the place, the church itself had already gone, leaving only the graveyard to mark what had once been there. The antiquarian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, noted that while the ground contains many inscribed monuments, none of them appears to date further back than the early eighteenth century. That gap between a medieval church and the oldest surviving legible stone is a common enough situation in Irish graveyards, where earlier markers in timber or uncut stone simply did not last, but it gives this site a particular quiet strangeness: a place that was clearly important for a very long time, yet whose inscribed memory begins relatively recently.
