Graveyard, Friarstown, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Friarstown, Co. Limerick

Somewhere beneath a long mound of river spoil in County Limerick, a graveyard has effectively been buried twice: once by time, and once by machinery.

What was clearly marked as 'Grave Yard' on the Ordnance Survey map of 1840 now lies beneath a linear heap of dredged material, roughly four to five metres wide, deposited along the north bank of the Camoge River in 1978. There is nothing to see at the surface, no kerbing, no inscriptions, no visible markers of any kind.

The site sits in gently undulating pasture and was recorded by Denis Power, whose notes were uploaded in November 2013. Before the dredging operation altered the landscape, the landowner recalls the area carrying low, uninscribed grave markers, the kind associated with early or informal burial grounds where individual commemoration was minimal or deliberately plain. Such markers are not uncommon in Ireland near ecclesiastical sites, where the poor, unbaptised children, or communities without resources for cut stone might be interred in ground adjacent to a more formal religious foundation. In this case, that foundation stands approximately sixty metres to the north: a friary recorded in the Sites and Monuments Record as LI023-030. The relationship between the two sites, whether the graveyard served the friary or predates it or belonged to a separate lay community, is not documented in the available record.

The location is not accessible as a visitor site in any formal sense. The spoil heap is the only above-ground feature, and without knowing precisely where to look, and understanding what you are looking at, it reads simply as a raised earthen bank along the riverbank. The 1840 Ordnance Survey map, available through the historic map viewer at osi.ie, offers the clearest indication of where the ground was once understood to hold burials. Anyone with a particular interest in the associated friary to the north would pass close by without realising that the low ridge beside the Camoge represents, in a quiet and accidental way, a double erasure.

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Pete F
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