Grave Yard, Kildrinagh, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
The boundary wall of this Kilkenny graveyard does not run straight.
At its north-western angle, the wall bends outward in a deliberate kink, pushed aside to make room for a mausoleum belonging to the St. George family of Woodsgift, dated 1825. It is an oddly frank piece of geometry: the wall of the dead adjusted to accommodate the ambitions of one particular family, their vault visibly altering the shape of the whole enclosure.
The site sits on a steep slope on the south-south-eastern side of a small valley, surrounded by tillage and grassland, with open views along and across the valley in most directions. The graveyard is dedicated to St. Drenan, an obscure Irish saint whose feast day falls on the 12th of December, according to a record made by Healy in the 1870s. The medieval church, positioned on the north side of the roughly lozenge-shaped graveyard, once stood at the centre of an entirely open burial ground. The first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 shows the graveyard boundary as a dashed line, indicating there was no enclosing wall at that point. By the time of the revised OS map around 1900, the wall had been built. The St. George mausoleum, which predates the wall by some decades, appears on the earlier 1839 map as a structure to the north-west of the church, suggesting the family had already established their presence before the enclosure caught up around them. Somewhere within the graveyard there is also a graveslab dating to the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, a flat decorated stone of the kind commonly used to mark the graves of clergy or local gentry in medieval Ireland.