Grave Yard, Oghil, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Oghil, Co. Kildare

On a low pasture ridge in County Kildare, there is a graveyard with no headstones, no enclosing wall, and no clear boundary on three of its four sides. The dead here, if they are here at all, have left almost no trace above ground; the interior is thick with nettles, and the only structural hint of the site's extent is a gently curving earthen scarp, between 0.4 and 0.8 metres high, running along the southern arc of the rectangle. To the east, even that modest definition has been lost to livestock trampling the ground over many years.

Local tradition holds that this is where monks from the nearby Cistercian abbey at Mooreabbey Demesne were buried. The Cistercians, a monastic order known for choosing remote and often boggy ground for their foundations, would have had practical reason to establish a burial place at some remove from the main complex. The connection between the two sites is said to have been maintained via a route known as The Dane's Road, which crossed the bog to the west by means of a togher, a type of raised or laid trackway built across wet ground, often from timber or brushwood, to allow passage where the land was otherwise impassable. The ridge on which the graveyard sits overlooks a wide expanse of that same bog, suggesting the location was chosen as much for its slight elevation above the wetland as for any other reason. No documentary evidence appears to survive confirming the monastic association; it rests on local memory rather than record.

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