Grave Yard, Curraghnagarraha, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Burial Grounds
At the northern crest of the Suir escarpment in County Waterford, a small circular graveyard holds a quiet anomaly: somewhere within it, there was once a possible ogham stone, one of those remarkable early medieval markers inscribed with an alphabet of notches along a central stem line, used primarily to record names. That stone, noted by a researcher named Blackett in 1860 or 1861, has since vanished entirely. Its disappearance is unrecorded and unexplained, which gives the site a slightly unresolved quality, the sense of something documented just before it was lost.
The graveyard itself surrounds the parish church of Fenoagh, and its shape is the first thing worth remarking on. Roughly circular, measuring about 42.7 metres north to south and 40.7 metres east to west, it is enclosed by a stone-faced bank of earth and stone topped with a hedge. Circular enclosures of this kind often indicate considerable antiquity, sometimes pre-dating the Christian structures built within them. The burials here date broadly from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century, though a headstone to one James Bryan carries the date 1701, pushing the site's commemorative use back at least to the turn of the eighteenth century, and likely much further given the enclosure's form.