Grave Yard, Cappagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Cappagh, Co. Kilkenny

In a small graveyard in the townland of Kilkiaran, not one of the headstones bears a name or a date.

The stones are there, scattered and rough across the ground, but none were ever inscribed, leaving the people buried here in a particularly complete anonymity. The site sits roughly fifty metres northwest of the Sruhnasilloge river, overgrown now with scrub and trees, and the church that once stood at its centre has dissolved so thoroughly into the earth that nothing of it is visible at ground level.

By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled, the burying ground was already described as obsolete, a place with no remaining church to speak of. The historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, was more precise about what had happened: the church was entirely destroyed, and the large rough stones scattered across the churchyard were, in his view, the remains of its demolished walls. The graveyard itself has shifted shape across the historical record in an oddly telling way. On the first edition six-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1839 it appears as a small irregular five-sided roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately thirty metres northeast to southwest and twenty metres northwest to southeast. By the 1900 to 1901 revision, it is shown as an unenclosed heart-shaped area of slightly different dimensions, suggesting either that its boundaries had decayed or that surveyors were simply reading a more ambiguous outline on the ground.

Among the stones remaining on the site are a bullaun stone and a pillar stone within the graveyard itself. A bullaun is a boulder or rock with one or more deliberately carved circular depressions, associated in Ireland with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual use. A stoup, a small basin once used to hold holy water, survives in a garden adjacent to the site. Together these fragments suggest a place of some early ecclesiastical significance, even if the community it served, and the church that served them, have left almost nothing else behind.

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