Graveyard, Clintstown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
In the angle where three boundaries converge, an early church and its graveyard have effectively vanished.
There are no stones, no mounds, no visible markers of any kind. The site exists almost entirely as a tradition, preserved in local memory and a handful of scholarly references, while the ground itself gives nothing away.
The historical thread is thin but persistent. Writing in 1905, the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan recorded a tradition of an early church and associated graveyard at Clintstown, locating it at the point where the townland meets both Brackin townland and the River Nore. The Nore is the only watercourse shown in that area on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, lending some precision to an otherwise vague tradition. A later local source, O'Kelly, writing in 1985, adds a further detail: a field in Clintstown known as the Castle Field, said locally to mark the site of an ancient church. Whether that field name preserves a genuine memory of ecclesiastical remains, or whether it conflates the church tradition with something else entirely, is unclear. What both sources agree on is the broad location, that corner of land where townland boundaries and river come together, which in the early medieval period was often precisely where a small monastic foundation or parish church would have been established, close to water and at a natural boundary point.
Nothing of the church or the graveyard is visible above ground today. The site is known only through the two historical references and the survival of a field name, which is itself the kind of quiet, incidental evidence that can outlast every physical trace of a place by centuries.