Church, Dunlavin, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Churches & Chapels
In the centre of Dunlavin, a small park occupies ground that was once a medieval church site, part of what records describe as the borough of Dunlavin.
The church itself is long gone, demolished before 1838 according to O'Flanagan, writing in 1928, and replaced by the present Church of Ireland parish church nearby. What remains is a quietly repurposed space: the old graveyard, tidied into a public park, with its headstones lifted from wherever time and subsidence had left them and re-erected in a ring around the perimeter, like a stone audience gathered at the edge of the grass.
Three headstones from the seventeenth century survive, each legible enough to carry a name and a date. Katherin Hughes died in 1668, Ann Wilkins in 1694, and a third stone, almost certainly for a William somebody, records a death somewhere in the 1670s, though the surname and the exact year have worn away beyond recovery. A plaque that once belonged to this site records something more specific: the rebuilding of the chancel in 1681. The chancel is the eastern section of a church, typically reserved for the clergy and the altar, and its reconstruction in that decade suggests the building was still in active use well into the late seventeenth century. The plaque itself no longer sits in the open; it was moved at some point into the vestry of St Nicholas' Church, where it survives out of the weather.
The park is unassuming enough that it would be easy to pass through without registering what it is. The headstones arranged around its edge reward a slow circuit; the lettering on the older stones is worn but not entirely illegible, and the dates, read carefully, place these individuals in a Wicklow that predates the Act of Union, the Rebellion of 1798, and most of the landscape features a visitor would now take for granted.
