Graveslab, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow

At Kilbride in County Wicklow, a small burial enclosure sits on a natural rise above a stream valley, and virtually nothing of it can be seen from the surface.

The enclosure measures just 5.8 metres by 6 metres, its boundary formed by a wall of uncoursed, loosely laid stone, with an entrance roughly 1.2 metres wide facing east. That modest footprint is easy enough to miss, but what the ground once held is considerably more interesting: an early medieval cross-inscribed graveslab, possibly set over a long cist (a stone-lined grave of a type common in early Christian Ireland, where the body was laid in a box formed by upright slabs), a fragment of a second such slab, and two simple granite crosses. One of these, bearing a small incised Latin cross, has since been removed to the National Museum of Ireland.

The finds were documented by Kilbride-Jones in 1939, and they point to a site of early medieval religious significance, the kind of small, localised sacred enclosure that once marked the Irish landscape far more densely than surviving remains suggest. Cross-inscribed graveslabs were a characteristic feature of early Christian burial practice in Ireland, typically carved between the seventh and twelfth centuries, and their presence here alongside freestanding granite crosses indicates that this modest square of ground was once a place of deliberate, considered commemoration. The fact that two crosses were raised, one of them decorated, suggests a community that was, at some point, putting real effort into marking the dead.

The site presents a particular challenge to the curious visitor: it is described as not visible at ground level. The enclosure wall, the slabs, the in-situ crosses, none of these announce themselves from the surface any longer. What remains is essentially an invisible archaeology, a presence registered in records rather than in stone you can put your hand on, with the most portable of its objects now held in Dublin rather than in the Wicklow valley where they were found.

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