Graveyard, Kilcommock Glebe, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilcommock Glebe, Co. Longford

What catches the eye first at this graveyard in County Longford is not a headstone but a window.

Slender stone mullions, the vertical dividing bars from a late-medieval church window, have been pulled from the rubble of the adjacent building and pressed into service as grave-markers. It is an quietly practical act of recycling that accidentally preserves the architectural remains of a building that might otherwise have vanished entirely.

The graveyard is associated with a church at Kilcommock Glebe and occupies a neat rectangle measuring 62 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south, enclosed by a stone wall. Entry is through a round-topped wrought-iron gate set into a substantial cut-stone surround in the east wall, and on either side of this gateway are memorial plaques dating to 1649, a year that fell in the middle of the Cromwellian wars and their attendant upheaval across Ireland. That two plaques marking that particular year were thought worth installing at the gateway suggests someone considered the date significant enough to commemorate formally, even as the surrounding landscape was being reshaped by conflict and dispossession. The memorials inside the enclosure span a much longer arc, running from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, giving the site a layered quality in which different eras of local history sit alongside one another with little ceremony.

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