Grave Yard, Churchclara, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
What makes this graveyard in Churchclara quietly unusual is not so much what is standing in it as what has been quietly repurposed within it.
Several architectural fragments, clearly salvaged from the medieval church at its centre, have been pressed into service as grave-markers, and a portion of a font shaft sits in the south-west corner, displaced from whatever liturgical role it once served. A font shaft would originally have supported a baptismal basin, the stone vessel used for christening; to find part of one resting at ground level among the headstones gives the place a slightly layered quality, as though the boundary between the church's working life and its afterlife has become porous.
The graveyard encloses a medieval church on the lower slopes of a hill, with open views to the east and south-east. Its rectangular footprint measures roughly 50 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south, bounded by a stone wall with roughly cut, slightly projecting coping stones. That wall is a relatively recent addition in historical terms: the first Ordnance Survey map of 1839 shows only an irregular dashed line around the church, suggesting the site was not formally enclosed at that point. By the time the OS revised the map around 1900, the wall had been built in the form it retains today, with an iron gate set between stone piers on the western side and a stile just to the north of it. The gravestones themselves date no earlier than the 18th century, though set against them is a graveslab from the 13th or 14th century at the west end of the church, considerably older than anything else marking a burial here. Perched on top of the southern boundary wall is a single dressed architectural fragment, chamfered and smoothly finished on two faces, its original context unknown but its survival suggesting someone thought it worth keeping rather than discarding when the enclosure was built.