Graveyard, Cherrymount, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
A small field in County Wicklow carries a name that outlasted whatever it once contained.
At Cherrymount, a modest parcel of land appears on Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and again on the 1908 revision simply labelled "The Graveyard", though no visible graves, markers, or formal burial ground are recorded there today. The name alone is what remains, attached to a place that has otherwise been absorbed into the quiet rhythms of agricultural land.
When a field inspector visited the site in 1990, the focus was on a nearby enclosure to the northwest, but the old map name caught attention. The fact that both the mid-nineteenth-century survey and its Edwardian revision used the same designation suggests the name was well established locally and not simply a cartographic error. Unnamed or informally used burial grounds of this kind are not unusual in Ireland; small plots were sometimes set aside for unbaptised children, known as cillíní, or for individuals excluded from consecrated ground for various reasons. Whether that applies here is not recorded, and the ground itself offers no obvious clues.