Graveyard, Fieldstown, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
On the grounds of Fieldstown House, north of the Broadmeadow River in County Dublin, there is a graveyard that holds almost nothing visible above the grass.
Two stone grave markers remain, and an iron cross, recovered at some point by the landowner, now hangs chained to a tree. That detail alone, a cross secured to a living tree rather than planted in the earth, hints at a place that has been quietly improvised around, tended without formal institutional support, and largely left to its own quiet deterioration.
The site itself is ancient in structure. A raised oval area, roughly 45 metres east to west, is defined by a bank and an external fosse, which is simply a shallow ditch dug to demarcate the enclosure, a form commonly associated with early ecclesiastical sites in Ireland. Within this enclosure lie the foundations of a church, recorded under the Sites and Monuments Register reference DU011-002001. The graveyard's use for unbaptised children places it in a tradition well documented across Ireland, where infants who died before baptism were buried in liminal ground, often an old or disused ecclesiastical enclosure rather than a consecrated parish cemetery. These informal burial grounds, sometimes called cillíní, occupied a strange middle space in local practice, neither fully sacred nor secular, quietly maintained by families and communities over generations. The Fieldstown site is no longer used for burials.
The graveyard sits within private grounds at Fieldstown House, so access is not straightforward and any visit would require permission from the landowner. The site is not signposted or managed as a public amenity. For those who do gain access, the enclosure's raised profile and surrounding bank are the most legible features, the kind of subtle earthwork that becomes easier to read in low winter light or when vegetation dies back. The chained iron cross, wherever precisely it hangs, is perhaps the most affecting thing here, less a monument than a makeshift memorial gesture that someone, at some point, felt strongly enough to secure in place.