Graveyard, Freneystown, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
In the upland river valleys of County Kilkenny, a small square graveyard encloses a secret it can no longer prove: the burial place of seven bishops, said to be the seven sons of a sixth-century monk, their graves marked by flat stones now largely swallowed by grass and earth.
The enclosure measures roughly 24 metres by 25 metres, its boundary a low wall of coursed shale limestone, still standing about six courses high, that has been quietly doing its job for centuries. No trace of the early medieval church that once occupied the south-western corner of this plot survives above ground, yet the place carries the unmistakable weight of somewhere that was, for a long time, considered important.
The site is associated with St. Scoithin, a sixth-century monk who established a hermitage here, giving rise to the placename recorded on the 1900 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Tiscoffin Church, derived from the Irish Tigh Scoithin, meaning the house of Scoithin. A later medieval church and a separate graveyard stand roughly 85 metres and 44 metres to the west, suggesting that religious activity at this location persisted and shifted across many generations. A holy well, known as St. Scoheen's Well, lies approximately 60 metres further west still, completing a cluster of early Christian features spread across the ridge. The tradition of the seven episcopal burials was recorded in the Ordnance Survey letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century documentary project in which local knowledge was gathered parish by parish across Ireland; the relevant passage, published in O'Flanagan's 1930 edition, describes the flagstones as already being partly covered when the account was written. In 1950, a cross-inscribed slab, a flat stone decorated with an incised cross of a kind commonly associated with early medieval Irish Christian sites, was found lying along the bank of the graveyard wall.