Graveyard, Kilderry, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
Beneath the grounds of Kilberry House in County Kilkenny lies a graveyard that has, for well over a century and a half, left no trace above ground.
No headstones, no boundary wall, no worn path through the grass. The surrounding land is still called the "church meadow", a name that quietly preserves what the landscape itself no longer shows.
The first-edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map records a rectangular enclosure here, roughly 21 metres north to south and 29 metres east to west, with the west gable of an old parish church forming part of its western boundary. That church served the parish of Kilderry, and both it and the graveyard occupied a position on the eastern edge of rolling grassland, above a steep drop into a river valley below. According to the historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, some slight traces of the old church still survived until around 1848, when they were entirely cleared away. The graveyard was obliterated at the same time, and a presbytery was built on the site by the Reverend John Delany, curate of Johnswell. Whatever had persisted through centuries of disuse was removed in a single act of construction, and what had been a place of burial became, in effect, invisible. The site now lies immediately north of the present Kilberry House, though nothing on the surface suggests what lies beneath the meadow grass.