Graveyard, Lisnafunshin, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
In a field beside the Dinin River in County Kilkenny, a low rectangular mound rises just half a metre above the surrounding grassland.
No church stands here, no headstones mark the ground in any conventional sense, and the area is thick with bushes. The field is simply called "Church Field", and the small burial ground it contains carries an older, more specific name: Sceac na nGéarlach, meaning the Bush of the Infants. It is what was once known in Ireland as a cillín, an informal burial place reserved for unbaptised children, those who, under Catholic doctrine, could not be interred in consecrated ground. These sites are found across the country, often at liminal locations, old boundaries, river edges, ancient earthworks, and they tend to persist quietly in the landscape long after their original religious and social context has faded from common memory.
By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded the place, it was already described as a "small obsolete burial ground", though the word obsolete clearly did not mean abandoned entirely. Writing in 1905, the historian Carrigan noted that the graveyard was "all overgrown with bushes" but was still being used for the burial of unbaptised children, and that no trace of the church which once stood nearby could be found. That church's absence is itself a small historical puzzle. Carrigan believed there had been a very ancient church at the northern edge of the townland of Lisnafunshin, within one field of the Dinin River, but by his time not a stone of it remained. Before the Reformation, the lands of Lisnafunshin and the nearby townland of Newtown had belonged to St. Francis' Abbey in Kilkenny, which accounts for the presence of ecclesiastical settlement in what is now unremarkable agricultural ground. The mound, roughly 24 metres east to west and 21 metres north to south, is likely all that physically survives of that long ecclesiastical history.