Graveyard, Kilmurry, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard without grave-markers is a peculiar thing.
On a low knoll along an east-facing valley slope in Kilmurry, Co. Wicklow, there is a site that has long been identified as a burial ground, yet no headstone, slab, or marker of any kind survives above the surface. What does remain is a quietly legible earthwork: an oval enclosure roughly 30 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about 20 metres across, defined by an earthen bank and, for a short stretch along the north, an internal fosse, a shallow ditch cut on the inside of the boundary rather than outside, which is the less common arrangement. A gap on the south-south-east side, wide enough to walk through and approached by a rough ramp, is likely the original entrance. Inside, the only visible feature is a low stony bank running north-west to south-east near the southern end of the knoll summit.
The site was noted as early as 1928 in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century project in which scholar-surveyors travelled Ireland documenting place names and local antiquities; the volume compiled by O'Flanagan described a church here with some graves to the east. The church itself has left no obvious trace above ground. In 2007, test trenches were opened immediately to the east of the enclosure ahead of house construction nearby, but the excavation, carried out under licence, produced nothing of archaeological significance. The site is protected under a preservation order, which means that whatever lies beneath the earthwork, undisturbed, for now it remains so.

