Grave Yard, Geraldine, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Burial Grounds
On the 16th green of the Athy Golf Club in County Kildare, golfers line up their putts within a few metres of a walled graveyard that occupies a low but conspicuous hillock. The cemetery presses close on three sides, north, east, and south, separated from the fairway by little more than the mortared stone wall that encloses it. It is an arrangement that feels quietly surreal, the leisure of one era laid out immediately beside the long, continuous business of the dead.
The enclosure is rectangular, roughly 45 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 36.5 metres across, with the wall rising to about 2.5 metres at its south-east corner. Inside, the ground is well maintained and carries a dense concentration of 19th and 20th-century headstones alongside a handful of older flat graveslabs. More intriguing still are the foundations of a possible church located just south-west of centre. Foundations of this kind, when they survive beneath or alongside a working graveyard, often indicate a medieval or early modern place of worship that fell out of use and was eventually absorbed into the surrounding burial ground. The graveyard takes its placename, Geraldine, from the district in which it sits, itself a reference to the Fitzgerald family, the Earls of Kildare, whose influence across this part of Leinster stretched from the medieval period well into the sixteenth century.
The site is skirted by a laneway at its north-west corner, which offers the clearest approach on foot. The hillock on which it stands gives the enclosure a slight elevation above the surrounding ground, making the wall and the headstones visible from some distance across the golf course, an odd landmark in an unexpected setting.