Graveyard, Loughill, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Loughill, Co. Kilkenny

A small patch of wet, marshy ground on a west-facing slope in County Kilkenny holds what was once a burial place, though you would be hard pressed to know it today.

No inscribed headstones mark the spot, no enclosing wall sets it apart from the surrounding scrub, and the deciduous trees that have crept across the site over the decades have likely obscured or disturbed whatever rough markers once stood here. The graveyard sits on a natural terrace just to the south-east of a 13th-century church, the ground dropping away sharply to the west of the church's west gable, lending the whole area an atmosphere of quiet subsidence, as if the landscape itself has been slowly reclaiming what was left behind.

By the time the Ordnance Survey letters were compiled in 1839, the ground was already no longer in use as a burial place, a detail recorded by O'Flanagan. When the historian Carrigan wrote about the site in 1905, he described it as long unused, noting only rough, uninscribed headstones remaining. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map produced between 1899 and 1902 marks the area as a disused burial ground with a dashed boundary line, measuring roughly twenty metres east to west and about ten metres north to south. Significantly, that dashed line, rather than a solid one, suggests the graveyard was never formally enclosed, which is itself unusual; most burial grounds of any age accumulated at least a rudimentary wall or ditch over time. Here, the dead appear to have been laid in open ground beside their church, with nothing more substantial than the terrace itself to define the space.

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Pete F
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