Graveyard, Lackagh More, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Lackagh More, Co. Kildare

Among the grave markers at Lackagh More, a couple of stone fragments sit quietly repurposed from their original lives elsewhere. One is a round window head, roughly half a metre wide, and the other a window transom, both now serving as burial markers in a walled graveyard on level pasture in County Kildare. The window head may once have belonged to a medieval church that preceded the modern one standing on the same site; the transom is thought to have come not from any church at all, but from Lackagh Castle, the substantial tower house that stands just thirty-five metres to the west-south-west. It is an unusual detail, the stonework of a fortified residence finding its final use among the dead of a neighbouring parish.

The graveyard itself is roughly rectangular, about eighty metres long and sixty metres wide, enclosed by a stone wall. Its setting places it in a cluster of layered historical features: the castle to one side, and roughly two hundred metres to the east, a motte, the flat-topped earthen mound characteristic of early Norman fortification, where a timber or stone tower would once have commanded the surrounding land. The modern church within the enclosure occupies a site where an earlier, medieval church is believed to have stood, though no fabric of that older building survives visibly above ground. What does survive are those two architectural fragments, reused with the practical unselfconsciousness common to rural Irish burial grounds, where old stone was rarely wasted.

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Pete F
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