Graveyard, Cartroncoragh, Co. Westmeath
Co. Westmeath |
Burial Grounds
The northern half of Drumraney graveyard in Cartroncoragh, County Westmeath, is entirely empty of grave markers.
No headstones, no inscribed slabs, nothing to indicate burial. A 2013 clean-up scheme levelled the ground and reseeded the grass, erasing whatever surface features once existed there, and so what had been a visibly complex site was smoothed into something deceptively plain. Meanwhile, the southern half preserves centuries of layered occupation, with medieval stonework scattered among post-medieval headstones, window mullions lying flat on the ground, and some architectural fragments apparently pressed into service as grave markers when nothing else was to hand.
The graveyard is associated with St Éanán, whose feast days fall on the 19th of August and the 18th of September, and a holy well dedicated to him survives about 140 metres to the north-east. The irregular enclosure, roughly 80 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, is bounded by a post-medieval stone wall whose fabric includes punch dressed stone salvaged from the medieval church of Drumraney, a technique of finishing stonework by repeated striking that leaves a distinctive textured surface. The same reused material appears in the piers of the entrance gate at the north-east angle. A church stood in the northern quadrant of the graveyard on every edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, but no surface trace of it remains today. That building was probably itself a post-medieval replacement for the earlier medieval church, whose architectural fragments, including the scattered mullions, are what survive. A low scarp running east to west across the middle of the graveyard, standing between one and one and a half metres high, marks the boundary of the older burial ground, which occupies the southern half. Two seventeenth-century graveslabs are recorded within it, along with other memorials from the post-medieval period. Drumraney castle stands about 300 metres to the north, adding to the sense that this was once a place of some local consequence, its various phases of religious and secular life now compressed into a single, quietly layered field.
