Graveyard, Ballyandrew, Co. Wexford

Co. Wexford |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Ballyandrew, Co. Wexford

A graveyard that contains no evidence of burial is a peculiar thing.

The site at Ballyandrew in County Wexford carries that name, yet what survives on the ground is less a place of the dead than a quiet puzzle: a slightly raised quadrilateral enclosure, roughly 20 to 40 metres east to west and 20 to 30 metres north to south, defined by a field bank, a townland boundary, and a low scarp on the eastern and south-eastern sides no more than 0.2 metres high. No graves have been identified within it.

The enclosure is associated with a church known as Seana Kyle, an Irish phrase meaning simply "the old church", recorded by Hore in the early twentieth century. The site sits on a low rise with hills closing in on most sides within about one and a half kilometres, open only to the south-east. One of its most tangible former features, a bullaun stone, a large stone with one or more bowl-shaped hollows ground into its surface, often found at early ecclesiastical sites and sometimes associated with healing or ritual use, has long since been removed. It is now kept at Ballyboy, roughly four and a half kilometres to the west. Immediately to the south of the enclosure lies a rath, the remains of a circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Irish settlement, suggesting that the ecclesiastical and domestic landscapes here once sat in close proximity to one another.

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