Corbally Burial Ground, Edmondstown, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Churches & Chapels

Corbally Burial Ground, Edmondstown, Co. Westmeath

At the centre of a working graveyard in County Westmeath, half-hidden beneath tree cover, the collapsed walls of what may once have been a small church have been quietly dissolving into the ground for centuries.

The site sits on a low ridge with open views across the surrounding pasture, yet the structure itself has become almost invisible, absorbed into the landscape it once presided over. What makes this particularly curious is how thoroughly it slipped from the cartographic record: neither the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1837 nor the revised twenty-five-inch edition of 1913 shows any trace of it.

When the site was examined in 1983, what remained was a roughly rectangular enclosure defined by the collapsed remnants of three walls. The western wall had become a stony mound roughly seven metres long and between one and a half to two metres wide. Traces of the northern and southern walls were also present, each surviving for at least seven to eight metres. The eastern wall, if any portion of it survives at all, lies behind dense scrub and could not be assessed. Occasional rough stones and small boulders scattered nearby mark individual burials, suggesting the ground around this possible church has long served as a place of interment. The pattern is a familiar one in rural Ireland: a small early ecclesiastical building, likely unroofed and abandoned long before anyone thought to map it, gradually becoming indistinguishable from the earth around it.

The graveyard remains in use as a burial ground, and the tree cover that makes the possible church site invisible on aerial photography is also what gives the enclosure its sheltered, half-forgotten quality. Visitors who know where to look can still trace the line of that low stony mound along the western edge, the clearest surviving evidence that something more substantial once stood here.

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