Graveyard, Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Deerpark, Co. Wicklow

At the foot of Powerscourt Waterfall, one of the tallest in Ireland, there is a small burial ground that has been quietly disappearing for nearly two centuries.

The site occupies a natural level platform, roughly 30 metres by 20 metres, on the bank of the Dargle River, positioned where the river's steep wooded banks create a kind of natural enclosure. It is the sort of place that invites questions rather than answers.

By 1836, the cut stone from the doorway and windows of a small church associated with the burial ground had already vanished, as noted in the Ordnance Survey letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1928, which drew on earlier fieldwork. The stonework's disappearance is not unusual for rural ecclesiastical sites of this kind; dressed stone was a practical resource, and small early churches were frequently quarried for building material over the centuries. More unusual was the presence of a bullaun stone, documented by the scholar Liam Price in the late 1950s. A bullaun is a large boulder into which one or more rounded hollows have been deliberately ground, and they are found at many early Irish ecclesiastical sites, often associated with ritual use, healing, or cursing. This particular example was described as a large boulder with four such hollows, sitting on the riverbank to the south of the platform. Its current location is uncertain, and the entire site has suffered considerably from flooding in recent years, which has further eroded whatever physical fabric remained.

The combination of a lost church, a displaced bullaun stone, and repeated flood damage gives this site an unsettled quality. What was once a small but layered early Christian landscape, tucked into the gorge below one of Wicklow's most visited natural features, has been reduced to traces, most of them now gone or unlocatable without specialist knowledge of the terrain.

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