Grave Yard, Ballynaboley, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Ballynaboley, Co. Kilkenny

A graveyard that contains no visible graves is an odd thing to encounter, and the one at Ballynaboley in County Kilkenny has been edging towards invisibility for well over a century.

Sitting on a north-facing slope where the rising ground cuts off most of the surrounding view, the site is today little more than a faint rectangular outline in the earth, roughly 55 metres across and 27 metres deep, defined by a low earthen bank that barely registers underfoot. There are no headstones, no kerbing, no markers of any kind to indicate that the dead were once brought here.

The graveyard appeared clearly enough on the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839, mapped as a roughly rectangular unenclosed plot, wider at the north at around 70 metres and narrowing to about 43 metres at the south, with a trackway running along its western edge in a northwest to southeast direction. A medieval church occupies the southwest angle of the site, and a tower house, the kind of fortified residential structure common to late medieval Kilkenny, stands approximately 230 metres to the northwest. By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its maps between 1899 and 1902, the graveyard had vanished from the record entirely. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan noted that the surrounding churchyard had by then no appearance of graves, that the fence which had formerly protected it had been thrown down, though he observed it could still be traced. What he was describing was already a place in the process of forgetting itself, the physical boundary dismantled and the burials beneath it left without any surface acknowledgement.

What remains now is the kind of site that rewards patience and low expectations. The earthen bank that once enclosed it is barely discernible, and without some prior knowledge of its dimensions and alignment, it would be easy to walk across the ground and notice nothing at all.

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