Graveyard, Kilkieran, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilkieran, Co. Kilkenny

On the south-western slope of a small hillock above the rolling grassland of County Kilkenny, there is a graveyard with no visible graves.

The ground is level, the headstones are gone, and nothing announces itself as a place of burial. The only irregularity is a low mound near the eastern end of the enclosure. Were it not for the faint trace of an old boundary fence, the site would be entirely indistinguishable from the surrounding fields, and in practical terms, at ground level, it is.

The ecclesiastical historian William Carrigan, writing in 1905, recorded what was already then a place of near-total erasure. The parish church that once stood here was dedicated, he supposed, to St. Kieran of Ossory, one of the twelve apostles of Ireland and the patron saint of the Diocese of Ossory, whose association with this part of Kilkenny gave the townland its name. The church itself had vanished without trace by Carrigan's time, having stood somewhere on the roadside between Carrigeen and Sandfordcourt. The graveyard, he noted, had no appearance of graves, its surface being quite level, and no headstones remained visible. What survived, just, was the line of the enclosing fence, enough to show the original extent of the site.

What makes this place quietly arresting is precisely its blankness. It represents a kind of double forgetting: a church demolished so thoroughly that nothing remains, and a burial ground that no longer looks like one. The perimeter is the only legible thing left, a faint outline holding the memory of a community's sacred space against the slow, indifferent levelling of time.

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Pete F
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