Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
Midway along the southern wall of this graveyard in Glebe, Co. Longford, there is a blocked-up gateway that no one has passed through for a very long time.
Three metres tall and 2.4 metres wide, its pointed arch is still largely intact, though the opening itself has been filled in with stone. A buttress on the western side projects outward beyond the line of the wall, as if bracing against some long-forgotten pressure. Everything about it suggests this was once the main entrance to the enclosure, before the axis of approach shifted and a wrought-iron gate was installed at the southern end of the eastern wall instead.
The graveyard sits within a broader ecclesiastical enclosure and measures roughly 48 metres east to west by 45 metres north to south, its subrectangular shape a common feature of early Irish church sites where the enclosing boundary followed the ground rather than a surveyor's grid. At its centre stands a late-medieval church, and inside that building a graveslab carries the date 1696. The memorial stones in the surrounding ground go back further still: the earliest legible example dates to 1650, placing it in one of the more turbulent decades in Irish history, just as the Cromwellian settlements were reshaping land ownership and community life across the midlands. The wall sections flanking the blocked gateway are approximately 0.9 metres thick and appear to be medieval in date, suggesting the enclosure has been in continuous use across several centuries while quietly accumulating its layers.
Visitors entering through the current wrought-iron gate can use the adjacent stone stile, a low step built into the wall beside the gate for easier access. Once inside, the blocked southern gateway is most easily appreciated from the interior, where the difference in wall height, one metre on the exterior face and 1.6 metres on the interior, gives a clearer sense of the ground level and the original scale of the opening. The graveslab of 1696 is located within the church itself rather than in the open ground outside.
