Grave Yard, Lullymore, Co. Kildare
Co. Kildare |
Burial Grounds
What makes this graveyard in Lullymore quietly remarkable is not what it contains now, but what it has gradually given away. A rectangular enclosure, roughly 50 metres east to west and 38 metres wide, bounded by a mortared stone wall, it sits as part of a wider early ecclesiastical complex that once accumulated an unusual concentration of cross-inscribed stones. These are flat or shaped stones bearing incised crosses, a common feature of early Christian sites in Ireland, often associated with prayer, commemoration, or the marking of sacred space. Several remain embedded in the enclosing wall itself, three of them built directly into the stonework. But many others have quietly departed over the years, redistributed across the surrounding landscape.
At some point, seven cross-inscribed stones and two small carved crosses, all originally belonging to this graveyard, were relocated to a 1798 memorial situated roughly 600 metres to the northwest in Lullymore West, presumably incorporated when that monument was constructed or later arranged around it. A further cross-inscribed stone made a longer journey and is now held at the Bog of Allen Nature Centre Museum. The site also retains a bullaun stone near its centre, a bullaun being a large stone with one or more rounded hollows, likely worn or deliberately cut, and long associated with early monastic and holy well traditions across Ireland. Together, these elements point to a site with deep early Christian roots, even if the physical evidence has been quietly dispersed across several locations over the centuries.
The graveyard has been refurbished in recent times, with headstones cleaned and re-erected and the ground reseeded, giving the interior a tended, orderly appearance that sits in slight contrast to the antiquity of the stones embedded in its walls. Visitors looking carefully at the perimeter wall will find those three remaining cross-inscribed stones worked into the fabric of the structure, easy to overlook if you are not specifically searching for them.
