Graveyard, Ferrybank, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Ferrybank, Co. Wicklow

Beneath the houses of Ferrybank in Arklow, human bones lie in graves that may predate the Norman period by centuries.

The site, marked plainly as 'Site of Grave Yard' on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1838, sits on low-lying marshy ground, the kind of waterlogged terrain that tends to swallow evidence quietly and completely. Before 1927, excavations or disturbances at the location uncovered human skeletons arranged in what appear to have been lintelled graves or long cists, a form of burial in which the body is enclosed within flat stone slabs, common in early medieval Ireland. A trapezoidal tombstone, possibly of medieval date, was also recovered from the site and found its way to Shelton Abbey, where it was recorded by Ronan in 1927.

The ground here may once have belonged to a Cistercian abbey, granted by Theobold Walter to the Cistercians of Furness, an English monastery with roots in Lancashire. The Cistercians were a reforming monastic order who favoured remote or marginal land, and marshy riverside terrain was not unusual for their foundations. Gwynn and Hadcock, writing in 1970, noted that any abbey on this spot may have existed only briefly, leaving little trace above ground. The site formed part of the medieval borough of Arklow, a planned settlement of considerable importance in the Norman period, which lends some weight to the idea that a religious house, however short-lived, once operated here. What exactly stood on this ground, and for how long, remains genuinely uncertain.

Today the site offers nothing to see. Houses cover it entirely, and the marshy ground that once defined it has long since been built over. The interest lies less in what survives than in what the 1838 map and a handful of disturbed burials suggest was once here, a fragment of medieval Arklow that left almost no trace except in the ground itself.

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