Graveyard, Arklow, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
What looks from the street like an ordinary public park on the north side of Arklow's Main Street is, in fact, a medieval graveyard in quiet disguise.
The ground has been levelled and landscaped, leaving no visible trace of burial beneath the grass, yet the headstones have not been removed. They have been lifted and arranged around the perimeter, standing like a silent audience to whatever the park's daily life brings: lunch breaks, passing dogs, the ordinary rhythms of a market town.
The land was once the site of the medieval church of St Mary, and the graveyard surrounding it served the town through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map was made in 1838, the site was recorded simply as 'Grave Yard', already a distinct landmark on the town's layout. The rectangular plot measures roughly 29 metres east to west and 23 metres north to south, dimensions that still define the park today even if nothing at ground level signals them. Among the headstones arranged around its edges are examples carved by Denis Cullen, a stonemason whose work represents the kind of local craft tradition that rarely survives in situ anywhere in Ireland. Headstone carving in this period was a skilled trade, and named carvers are relatively uncommon in the surviving record, which makes Cullen's attributable work here of particular interest.
The headstones themselves reward a slow circuit of the park's perimeter. The arrangement is orderly rather than atmospheric, the stones set against walls or fencing rather than rising from the earth, but the carvings, lettering styles, and iconography typical of Irish funerary work from the 1700s and 1800s are legible to anyone who pauses to look. It is a strange place to spend a few quiet minutes, situated as it is in the middle of an active town centre, carrying its medieval origins and its graveyard past with very little fuss.