Graveyard, Clontubbrid, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Clontubbrid, Co. Kilkenny

At the southern end of a graveyard in Clontubbrid, just outside the present churchyard wall, the ground rises and humps in a way that looks, to a careful eye, less like natural terrain and more like the remains of something deliberately built.

What stands there is, according to the historian William Carrigan writing in 1905, the ghost of a parish church that disappeared very long ago, its site presenting the appearance of a half-dismantled rath. A rath is a circular earthen enclosure, typically associated with early medieval settlement, and the comparison gives some sense of how thoroughly the original building has been absorbed back into the landscape.

Carrigan's observation, published in his 1905 history of the Diocese of Ossory, points to a layering of use that the current site only partially reflects. The present sub-rectangular graveyard, roughly 46 metres north to south and 60 metres east to west, is almost certainly smaller than the original burial ground, which would have extended around the vanished church. A modern Roman Catholic church now sits just north of the graveyard's centre, aligned east to west in the traditional manner. Tucked into the south-east angle of the enclosure is a holy well, a feature common at early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, where pre-Christian sacred springs were frequently absorbed into Christian practice and given the names of local saints.

The graveyard sits on a slight knoll on a valley terrace amid rolling grassland, with open views in all directions. The entrance is in the western wall, reached from the public road that runs north-west to south-east along that side of the enclosure. The holy well in the south-east corner and the subtle earthwork outside the southern wall are the details most worth seeking out, the first still present and quietly functional, the second a faint but legible trace of what once stood here.

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