Graveyard, Bahana, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
In a graveyard in County Wicklow, among ordinary headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two early medieval grave slabs once lay.
One remains on site, a slab measuring around one and a half metres long, carved with a full-length ringed openwork cross. The other is gone, removed to the National Museum of Ireland, but its inscription survives: 'OROIT DO FACHTAIN', an Old Irish phrase meaning 'a prayer for Fachtna', the kind of quiet petition that stone carvers left on slabs across early Christian Ireland. The fact that one slab stayed and one travelled tells its own quiet story about how these objects have been valued, studied, and dispersed over the centuries.
The graveyard at Bahana is rectangular, roughly fifty metres east to west and thirty-five metres north to south, enclosed by a modern wall. At its centre lie the poorly preserved foundations of what is recorded as Whaley Abbey, a church whose remains are now little more than outlines in the ground. The second slab was noted in print by Braybrook in the late nineteenth century, and the site appears in Liam Price's work from 1946, suggesting it attracted the attention of antiquarians and local historians across different eras. The mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century headstones scattered through the same enclosure indicate the site remained in use as a burial ground long after the medieval church fell into ruin, a common pattern in Ireland where Christian communities continued to bury their dead within or beside the walls of earlier ecclesiastical foundations.
The slab that remains in the graveyard, with its ringed openwork cross carved across the full face, rewards close inspection. The ringed cross, where the arms of the cross are connected by a circle, is one of the most recognisable forms in early Irish stone carving, and the openwork style, where the stone between the arms is cut away rather than left solid, takes considerable skill to execute. It sits within the ruined footprint of the abbey, which means a visitor is effectively standing inside a church that has not had walls for a very long time.