Graveyard, Carragh, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Carragh, Co. Kildare

A graveyard that fails to appear on an Ordnance Survey map drawn up while it was presumably already in use raises quiet questions about how places get recorded, and how easily they slip through the net. The burial ground at Carragh in County Kildare is still active today, yet the first edition six-inch OS map of 1838 makes no mention of it, leaving a small gap between the cartographic record and the physical reality of a site that has clearly been burying its dead for centuries.

The ground itself occupies a rectangular plot, roughly 40 metres east to west and about 30 metres wide, set on a gentle east-facing pasture slope. Three sides are enclosed by a mortared stone wall, while the eastern boundary is defined by a deep drain, some two metres deep and nearly two metres wide, an unusual choice of demarcation that gives the enclosure an almost fortified quality. Church ruins sit in the southern sector of the plot. The headstones that mark most of the burials are accompanied by a smaller number of flat graveslabs, the oldest legible examples dating to the eighteenth century, though the association with the ruined church suggests the site's use goes back considerably further. Two roadside crosses once stood nearby, one approximately 200 metres to the north-west, a second somewhere in the general vicinity, hinting at a denser landscape of devotional markers that has since been largely lost. A modern extension now stretches to the east and south, so the graveyard continues to grow even as the older portions quietly accumulate their layers.

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Pete F
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