Church, Redcross, Co. Wicklow
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Churches & Chapels
At Redcross in County Wicklow, a graveyard sits within an oval earthen enclosure that predates any building now standing beside it.
The enclosure, roughly 45 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, is defined by a low bank rising to about a metre at its western side, and the ground within it sits noticeably higher than the surrounding earth, a sign that burials have accumulated here over a very long period. The 1829 church stands just outside and to the west of this enclosure, as though it arrived late and was not quite invited in.
By the time the Ordnance Survey mapped the area in 1838, the site was already labelled simply as "Church, Grave Yard", though even then no physical trace of an earlier church survived above ground. O'Flanagan, writing in 1928, confirmed that nothing remained of whatever structure had originally occupied the site. The enclosure itself, oval in shape and slightly raised, is the kind of form associated in Irish archaeology with early medieval ecclesiastical foundations, where the boundary of the sacred space outlasts the buildings within it by many centuries. The graveslabs inside are predominantly 18th century in date, the earliest carrying the year 1712, but a particularly notable group among them are cut from purple slate and worked in the same distinctive style as slabs found at nearby Ballymoat. The recurrence of this style across sites suggests a local tradition of stone-cutting, perhaps centred on a single workshop or craftsman serving the parishes of this part of Wicklow.