Graveyard, Colmanstown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard shaped roughly like a circle is not the kind of thing most visitors would notice, but at Colmanstown in County Dublin the geometry of the boundary wall carries a considerable amount of history within it.
The sub-circular plan is a tell-tale sign that the current enclosure follows the footprint of a much earlier ecclesiastical site, a type of rounded boundary common to early medieval Irish monasteries and church settlements, where the sacred space was enclosed in a curving perimeter that often mirrored cosmological or practical traditions of the period. Sitting on a natural rise with the ground dropping away to the east, the site has an air of quiet deliberateness about it, as though whoever chose the location understood the value of elevation.
Within the graveyard wall, specifically along the eastern and north-eastern quadrant, there are traces of a bivallate enclosure, meaning a double-ditched boundary system consisting of two concentric fosses, or ditches, separated by a bank. The recorded measurements are precise: the outer fosse is 2.75 metres wide and 1.15 metres deep, the internal bank is 1.25 metres wide and 0.8 metres high, and the inner fosse runs to 4 metres wide and 1.1 metres deep. This kind of multi-vallate arrangement is associated in Ireland with sites of some status, suggesting that whatever stood here in the early ecclesiastical period was not a minor foundation. The site is catalogued by the Archaeological Survey of Ireland under reference DU020-009004-, and the survey notes were compiled by Geraldine Stout.
The graveyard is described as very overgrown, which means that reading the landscape requires some patience and a willingness to look past the surface. The yew trees present on the site are worth noting in themselves; yews are a long-standing feature of Irish ecclesiastical enclosures, associated with sanctity and longevity, and their presence here is consistent with the site's early religious character. The earthwork traces of the bivallate enclosure are subtle rather than dramatic, so it helps to approach the eastern section of the interior wall with the measurements in mind, watching for the slight rise and fall of ground that marks the old bank and fosses beneath the vegetation.