Cross, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Crosses & Monuments

Cross, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

On a low rise at the edge of a stream valley in County Wicklow, there is a burial ground that is almost entirely invisible.

No mound breaks the surface, no marker announces itself to a passing walker. What lies beneath, however, is considerably more interesting than the unremarkable ground above it.

The site is a small square enclosure, measuring roughly 5.8 metres by 6 metres, defined by a wall of uncoursed stone with an entrance about 1.2 metres wide on the eastern side. That modest footprint contained several early medieval finds, documented by Kilbride-Jones in 1939. Among them was a cross-inscribed graveslab, a type of carved stone used to mark or cover burials in early Christian Ireland, which may have been placed over a long cist, a form of stone-lined grave in which the body was laid at full length. A fragment of a second graveslab was also recovered. Two simple granite crosses were found as well, one of them bearing a small incised Latin cross. That piece has since been transferred to the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, leaving the site itself without its most legible object. What remains at Kilbride is the enclosure, the faint architecture of a very old burial practice, and the question of who was interred with enough ceremony to warrant carved stone at all.

Because nothing of the site is visible at ground level, there is little to observe on a visit without prior knowledge of exactly where to look. The interest here is less in what can be seen and more in the density of early medieval activity compressed into such a small area, a community's dead, marked in stone, on a quiet rise that the landscape has since quietly swallowed.

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