Grave Yard, Morristownbiller, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Morristownbiller, Co. Kildare

Sitting in the middle of flat, open tillage in County Kildare, this graveyard in Morristownbiller has an quietly disorienting quality. There is no ruined church tower to announce it, no dramatic hillside setting. Just a sub-rectangular enclosure, roughly seventy metres long and forty metres wide, wrapped in an ivy-covered stone wall that curves gently at its north-eastern end, where a set of steps marks the only obvious point of entry. The surrounding farmland makes the whole thing feel oddly marooned.

Once inside, the ground is noticeably uneven, a sign that the site has a longer history than its surviving markers suggest. The legible headstones date from the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but a church once stood in the eastern sector of the enclosure. It has since been levelled entirely, leaving no visible structure above ground, only the irregular humps and hollows beneath the overgrown surface that hint at what has been absorbed back into the earth over time. The loss of the church, with no remaining masonry to orient the eye, shifts the graveyard into a different register: it reads less as a place attached to an institution and more as something that has simply persisted, tended or untended, through successive generations of tillage farming around it.

The ivy-covered perimeter wall, built in a roughly coursed style, is in reasonable condition and still clearly defines the boundary of the old ecclesiastical enclosure. Visitors should expect uneven and potentially muddy ground underfoot throughout the interior, particularly after rain.

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Pete F
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