Graveyard, Cuppanagh, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Cuppanagh, Co. Sligo

In the western half of this graveyard at Cuppanagh, five small rectangular plots are walled off from one another by roughly built drystone enclosures, the stones of which were partly salvaged from the ruined church nearby and, according to local knowledge, partly from a leacht cuimhne, a type of commemorative monument associated with early Christian sites.

Set into the wall of one of these plots is a carved plaque, less than half a metre wide but nearly a metre tall, depicting the crucifixion above a coat of arms and bearing the dates 1732 and 1733. The plaque itself dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, which means those years were not carved at the time of making but recorded retrospectively, perhaps marking deaths or the founding of a family burial enclosure. The combination of purloined sacred stonework, walled family plots, and a mounted armorial plaque gives this corner of the graveyard an unusually layered quality.

The site sits within the south-eastern quadrant of a wider ecclesiastical enclosure, and by 1836 the whole complex was recorded under the name Temple-Ronaun, rendered in Irish as Teampul Ronan, a dedication to Saint Ronan. The graveyard is roughly rectangular, measuring around 49 metres along its longer axis, with a low scarp running the full east-west width of the site where the ground drops away in the southern third, a subtle topographical irregularity that hints at earlier landscaping or structural activity now lost. Scattered among the predominantly late nineteenth and twentieth-century headstones are a number of uninscribed grave-markers, some arranged in north-south rows, a pattern that sometimes indicates earlier, pre-modern burials where the custom of orienting the dead differed from the standard east-west Christian alignment.

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