Graveyard, Lisbrack, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
At Lisbrack in County Longford, a small graveyard sits beside the remains of a late-medieval parish church, and the two have been quietly receding from view together.
When researchers visited the site in 2005, the ground was so densely overgrown that the memorial stones could not be read at all, their inscriptions and carvings effectively swallowed by vegetation.
The graveyard is modest in scale, measuring roughly 22 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 21 metres across, and its shape is subrectangular, a slightly irregular form common to early and medieval Irish burial grounds that often reflects the gradual accumulation of use over centuries rather than a single planned layout. The associated church occupies most of the north-western end of the enclosure. Parish churches of the late-medieval period in Ireland were typically modest stone structures serving local rural communities, and many fell out of use following the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving their graveyards to continue in use long after the building itself was abandoned. Here, both church and graveyard appear to have lapsed into disuse together, and the vegetation that had taken over by the time of the 2005 visit suggests a site that had gone largely unattended for some considerable time.