Graveyard, Kilmore, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilmore, Co. Westmeath

Beneath an ordinary working farmyard in County Westmeath, human skulls have already begun to reappear.

The landowner unearthed several near the perimeter of what may be an ancient ecclesiastical enclosure while laying out part of the yard to the west, and the find points to something that cartographers and archaeologists have long been trying to pin down: the lost medieval church of Kilmore, whose precise location has never been confirmed.

The paper trail goes back some way. The Down Survey of 1653 to 1659, a massive land mapping project carried out under William Petty following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, recorded the medieval church of Kilmore as standing to the south of its associated glebe land in the parish of Street. Glebe land was the plot attached to a church and set aside for the maintenance of its clergy, and here it measured five acres. By 1837, when the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch maps of Ireland, that same glebe land was still visible, and the modern farmyard was already occupying its north-western quadrant. The enclosure lying immediately to the east of the farmyard is thought to be ecclesiastical in origin, and the skulls turning up to the west of it suggest a graveyard associated with the church sat in exactly the area now covered by farm buildings. Taken together, the cartographic record and the human remains imply that the church of Kilmore stood on the very ground where tractors and outbuildings now sit, though the structural evidence has not survived to confirm it.

The site sits on a gentle rise in unremarkable pasture-land, with nothing visible above ground to mark what may lie beneath. The farmyard is private working land, and there is nothing at the surface to guide the eye. The significance of the place is almost entirely buried, known mainly through old maps, a chance discovery during construction work, and the quiet proximity of a curving field boundary that may once have enclosed something far older than the farm it now borders.

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