Grave Yard, Rathbeagh, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Rathbeagh, Co. Kilkenny

There is something quietly odd about the distribution of graves at Rathbeagh.

In this roughly D-shaped enclosure on the brow of a gentle east-facing slope in County Kilkenny, the headstones cluster thickly to the south and west, yet the ground north of the old church is conspicuously bare. Whether this reflects some long-forgotten local custom, a boundary of sanctified ground, or simply the practical preferences of generations of families, nobody now seems to record.

The graveyard, enclosed by a stone wall and entered from the north-east, sits in the fork of two roads and measures roughly sixty metres east to west and forty-three metres north to south. Its eastern portion contains a church with an attached residential tower, a combination that was not unusual in late medieval Ireland, when clergy or minor landowners sometimes built fortified quarters directly onto a place of worship for security. The gravestones that do survive largely date from the early eighteenth to the twentieth century, but the site is older. A graveslab dating to around 1600 lies within the enclosure, one that went unrecorded during a site visit in 1994 and only came to attention later, a reminder of how easily a stone can be overlooked in long grass. Perhaps more striking is the evidence of repurposing: three panels from a chest tomb, a type of raised box-like monument typically carved from a single block or assembled from slabs, have been taken apart and laid flat as individual grave-markers to the south, south-west, and south-east of the church. The original tomb they once formed is gone, but its components have been given a second life, each panel now marking a separate burial.

The site sits at an elevation that opens a broad view from north-north-west around through east to south-east, with higher ground cutting off the outlook in other directions. Visitors approaching from either road will find the entrance on the north-east side of the enclosure. The re-used chest-tomb panels and the early graveslab are worth seeking out in the eastern and southern portions of the site.

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