Grave Yard, Killeighter, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Killeighter, Co. Kildare

At the northern end of this graveyard in County Kildare, water from a holy well flows out through the boundary wall and into a stock trough on the other side, a quiet detail that manages to compress centuries of overlapping purpose into a single piece of stonework. The sacred and the agricultural share the same source, separated only by a mortared wall.

The enclosure itself is D-shaped, with an internal diameter of roughly 32 metres east to west and a notably straight western side running 37 metres. Its boundary is a low earthen bank, between 1.1 and 2.7 metres wide and no more than 0.8 metres high internally, faced on the outside by a well-built mortared stone wall that reaches up to 1.9 metres at its tallest. Inside, the ground slopes moderately downhill to the north, and it is at this lower end that the oldest-feeling elements are concentrated: a church, the holy well, and what is recorded as a holy tree. Upslope to the south lies a possible cillín, a children's burial ground of the kind once used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated burial rites. The graveyard sits immediately uphill of what may be an even earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, suggesting that religious activity here accumulated across a long stretch of time rather than beginning at any single, identifiable moment. The readable headstones date from the nineteenth century onwards, and burials continue to be formally arranged in plots to the south of the church.

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Pete F
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