Grave Yard, Culleen More, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Culleen More, Co. Westmeath

The graveyard at Culleen More carries the name Kilbride, a place-name derived from the cult of St Brigid, yet there is no trace of a church anywhere within its bounds.

That absence is the quietly puzzling thing about this site. Graveyards of this kind, attached to an early ecclesiastical foundation but stripped of any standing architecture, are not uncommon in the Irish midlands, but the complete disappearance of any structural evidence here leaves the burial ground seeming to float free of its own origins, a community of the dead gathered around nothing visible.

The enclosure itself is polygonal in plan, roughly 41 metres north to south and 38 metres east to west, surrounded by a stone wall built after 1700. The ground inside is heavily mounded, the accumulated effect of generations of burials raising the interior well above the surrounding land, with the highest ground towards the centre and north-west and a slight depression running to the east and south. A description from 1976 noted that the headstones visible at that time appeared to be all relatively modern, suggesting that earlier grave markers, if there ever were any, had long since vanished into the vegetation. Briars and scrub now cover much of the interior, and coniferous trees planted around the perimeter have in places undermined and collapsed sections of the enclosing wall. Immediately to the north and north-west, the hollow of an old quarry sits just outside the boundary. Thirty metres to the west lies St Brigid's holy well, a holy well being a spring or water source associated with a saint and traditionally a place of local devotion and pattern-day gatherings. The River Brosna runs just 17 metres to the south. The clustering of graveyard, holy well, and river in such a small area points towards an early medieval sacred landscape that has largely dissolved into field and scrub, leaving only these quiet, overgrown coordinates behind.

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