Graveyard, Clonbroney, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
The ground inside this irregularly shaped graveyard in Clonbroney is described, with some understatement, as extremely uneven.
The earth rises and dips across a space measuring roughly 67 metres by 64 metres, enclosed partly by a stone wall and partly by a natural scarp, a sharp drop in the land that serves as a boundary where the masonry ends. Numerous low upright stones mark burials, many of them unnamed or unreadable now, while inscribed memorials from the eighteenth through to the twentieth centuries offer a longer thread of legible memory. A wrought-iron gate at the south-west corner, sitting adjacent to the roadway, is the way in.
What gives the site its particular weight is its association with a nunnery, the remains of which lie nearby. Clonbroney was an early Irish monastic site of some significance, and the tradition of burial here runs in a long, largely unbroken line from that ecclesiastical past into relatively recent centuries. A possible cross has also been identified in connection with the site, though its precise nature remains cautious in the record. The irregularity of the enclosure's shape, neither square nor circular but something in between, suggests the boundary followed older, pre-existing features of the landscape rather than being laid out to any tidy plan.