Grave Yard, Carrowleigh, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Carrowleigh, Co. Waterford

Built into the graveyard wall at Carrowleigh, visible from the roadside, is a bullaun stone, a block of dressed or shaped rock bearing one or more cuplike depressions, probably used in early medieval ritual or everyday grinding. That this ancient object was simply incorporated into the boundary wall rather than removed or discarded says something about how layers of use accumulate quietly in Irish sacred landscapes. The graveyard itself has an unusual triangular shape, roughly sixty metres east to west and eighty metres north to south, and the irregularity is not accidental. The boundary appears to have been cut diagonally at the northwest corner by a northeast to southwest roadway, suggesting the original enclosure was larger before the road intruded and clipped its edge.

The site belongs to the parish of Rathgormuck, and the ruined church within the enclosure is its old parish church. The graveyard sits on a northeast-facing slope and is defined by a stone-clad earthen bank, the kind of boundary that in Irish ecclesiastical sites often marks out an ancient sanctified precinct. P. Power, writing in 1896 in the Waterford Archaeological Journal, recorded the church among the county's ancient ruined churches, placing it within a local tradition of early Christian foundation. About a hundred metres to the north stands a tower house, the fortified residential structure common in late medieval Ireland, its proximity to the church suggesting the usual close relationship between ecclesiastical and secular power that characterised rural Waterford in the medieval period.

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