Graveyard, Abbeyfeale, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard on the south side of a busy main street in a west Limerick market town is unremarkable enough on first glance.
What makes this one quietly odd is the absence at its centre: the site takes its name from an abbey, and yet no trace of that building remains above ground. The church or abbey recorded in the archaeological inventory, reference LI042-012001, has vanished entirely from the surface, absorbed into a rectangular plot roughly fifty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south, now hemmed in by housing to the south and a stone wall on the other sides.
The graveyard itself is largely a nineteenth and twentieth century affair. The earliest headstones noted by archaeologist Denis Power, who compiled the site record uploaded in August 2011, date to the 1820s. Just inside the western entrance gate stands a neo-classical limestone chest tomb, a style of above-ground burial monument popular among the merchant and professional classes of early nineteenth-century Ireland, this one dated to the 1830s. Five more chest tombs line the eastern wall, and two further examples survive near the centre of the plot, though these are now largely obscured by sycamore growth. The rest of the ground is given over to the more familiar run of nineteenth and twentieth century family plots.
The entrance sits near the western end of the south side, opening directly off Main Street. The chest tombs along the eastern wall are the most legible features to look for, though the two central examples require a little searching through the tree cover. The absence of any church ruin is itself worth noting as you walk the site; the ground underfoot almost certainly conceals foundations, but nothing breaks the surface to confirm it. It is a compact space and easily walked in a few minutes, sitting in plain sight in the middle of the town yet carrying a history that has, for the most part, quietly disappeared.