Grave Yard, Templemartin, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Templemartin, Co. Kilkenny

A medieval church wall doubling as a parish boundary marker is not something you encounter every day, yet at Templemartin in County Kilkenny that is precisely the arrangement that has persisted for centuries.

The graveyard here is an irregular, roughly D-shaped enclosure, approximately 52 metres by 26 metres, sitting at the foot of a north-east-facing slope. Its stone boundary wall incorporates the west gable and north wall of a ruined medieval church, and the 1839 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a parish boundary running along the north-north-west side of the site, tracing the same edge. The effect is of a place where administrative, ecclesiastical, and funerary functions have quietly folded into one another over a very long period.

The layers of burial here span at least six centuries. Inside the church ruin are four graveslabs of particular interest: two date to the 13th or 14th century, and two more to the 16th century. Graveslabs of this kind are carved stone markers, often bearing incised crosses, foliate decoration, or inscriptions, and they were typically commissioned by families of local standing. Alongside these medieval stones, the church interior also contains 19th-century table tombs and headstones, the table tomb being a raised rectangular chest of stone set over a grave. Outside, across the overgrown interior of the enclosure, the ground is densely populated with 18th and 19th-century headstones as well as uninscribed grave-markers, the plain, undated stones that mark the graves of those whose families could not afford, or did not choose, inscription. The combination of identifiable medieval craftsmanship and anonymous unmarked burials gives the site an unusually compressed social history.

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