Graveyard, Castlemarket, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Castlemarket, Co. Kilkenny

The ground immediately south of the ruined church at Castlemarket rises noticeably above the surrounding level, swelled upward by the pressure of centuries of burials layered one above the other.

It is a quiet, physical record of continuous use, the earth itself altered by the accumulated dead, in a graveyard that has been receiving them since at least the medieval period.

The church at the north-east corner of this roughly sub-rectangular enclosure dates to the thirteenth century. A stone plaque surviving from the seventeenth century records that the building was restored in 1646, only for Cromwellian forces to destroy it again around 1650, a fate shared by many ecclesiastical structures across Ireland during that period of violent disruption. The church sat in varying states of ruin until a reconstruction project carried out by FÁS, the Irish state employment and training agency, between 1984 and 1987 gave it something closer to its present form. Further work followed in 2005 and 2006, when the boundary wall to the north, east, and south was rebuilt and repaired, and the ground around the church was landscaped. The western boundary is still marked by a hedge rather than a wall, which gives that side of the enclosure a noticeably softer, older feel than the rest.

The majority of headstones both inside the church and scattered through the wider graveyard date to the eighteenth century, though the site has clearly never entirely ceased to function as a burial ground; the most recent stone is dated 2013. Access is through a gate in the east wall or over a stile at the south end of that same wall, and a stream runs in the low ground roughly fifty metres to the north.

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