Grave Yard, Slieveroe, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Slieveroe, Co. Monaghan

At the head of a small east-west valley in Slieveroe, County Monaghan, sits a patch of ground that has been quietly resisting the plough for as long as anyone has thought to record it.

Roughly subrectangular in shape, measuring around thirty metres north to south and twenty-five metres east to west, it appears on the 1834 Ordnance Survey six-inch map simply labelled as a "Grave Yard" in italic lettering. By the time the 1907 edition was produced, the cartographers had switched to gothic lettering and added the word "Caldragh", a term used in parts of Ulster for a burial ground of a particular, older kind, often associated with unbaptised children or those excluded from consecrated ground.

When investigators visited in the 1940s, they found a low, slightly raised area of untilled ground, reduced by then to roughly twenty-one by eighteen metres, with scattered stones inside and traces of walling at the western and eastern edges. More telling were traces of charcoal and bone in the soil matrix, quiet evidence that this was once, genuinely, a place of burial. By 1968 the interior stones had gone, though a low bank on the western side, about two metres wide and just under half a metre high, and a slight scarp to the east, were still legible in the landscape. The possibility that this was a children's burial ground, or cillin as such sites are more commonly known elsewhere in Ireland, would explain both its informal character and its long persistence outside the rhythms of ordinary agricultural use. These unconsecrated plots were typically maintained not through any official attention but through local memory and a reluctance to disturb the ground, a habit of respect that often outlasted the knowledge of who, exactly, lay there.

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