Graveyard, Carrigeen, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard with no graves is an odd thing to stand in, yet that is precisely what occupies the ground to the south of the old church at Carrigeen.
The small, square-shaped burial ground appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map pressed against the southern wall of the church, but by 1868 a visitor named Brash could find no evidence of interments in or around the building, and today not a single gravemarker or headstone survives above the surface. The ground holds its dead, if it ever held any in significant number, entirely without announcement.
The site belongs to Dysert Aenghusa, or Diseart Aonghasa, a monastery of the Céile Dé, a reform movement whose name translates roughly as "Clients of God" and whose members sought a stricter, more contemplative form of early medieval monasticism. The house was dedicated to St. Aonghas, a figure of considerable literary importance, believed to be the same Aonghas who was associated with Tallaght monastery in Dublin and who composed the Féilire Aonghasa, a metrical martyrology, that is, a verse calendar of saints' feast days. According to a late twelfth-century preface added to that text, Aonghas's life traced a path from a church bearing his name at Dysert, through Coolbanagher in Laois, where he allegedly began the martyrology, and finally to Tallaght, where he completed it. He died sometime between 815 and 830, with the 11th of March kept as his feast day, and was reputedly buried at Clonenagh in Co. Laois. The Limerick monastery's connection to wider ecclesiastical networks is confirmed by a 1033 entry in the Annals of the Four Masters recording the death of Conn, son of Maelpadraig, who held the position of erenagh, essentially a lay steward of church lands, at both Mungret, some 13 kilometres to the north-north-east, and Dysert Aonghasa simultaneously.
What survives at the site today is a multi-period church alongside a round tower immediately to its north, and the fragmentary foundations of a massive enclosing wall that once defined the monastic precinct. The burial ground to the south of the church has left no visible trace at ground level. Visitors exploring the area should look for those boundary wall foundations, which Brash noted were still partially visible in 1868, and consider that the absence of headstones here is not the result of clearance or neglect in any recent sense; the ground had apparently ceased to serve as a place of burial before the Ordnance Survey mapmakers even arrived to record it.