Graveyard, Ludden Beg, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A small rectangular depression in the ground, east of a ruined church wall, is easy to walk past without a second glance.
But at Ludden Beg, that shallow hollow in the grass is likely all that remains of a medieval chancel, the liturgical east end of a church that was once substantial enough to show up in detail on an Ordnance Survey map well into the twentieth century. The ruined nave still stands in the eastern quadrant of the graveyard, but the chancel, the section traditionally reserved for the altar and clergy, appears to have been levelled at some point after the 1923 OS six-inch survey recorded it standing. What is left is an absence, defined only by a faint outline in the turf.
The graveyard sits on a west-facing slope just east of a small laneway, in rolling pasture that opens out with views to the west, south, and east. The enclosure is sub-rectangular in plan, measuring roughly sixty metres northwest to southeast and fifty metres east to west, and is bounded by a mortared stone wall approximately one and a half metres high, built after 1700. That wall postdates the medieval church it now surrounds, and the combination of periods layered into a single modest site is part of what makes Ludden Beg quietly worth attention. Burials are concentrated in the western part of the enclosure, where a number of gravestones survive from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The graveyard remains in active use, meaning new interments continue alongside those older stones.
Access is via the small laneway to the west, with an entrance gate and stile at the northwest corner of the enclosing wall. A second stone stile, along with the remains of a coffin stand, survives in the eastern section of the wall, directly opposite the east gable of the medieval church ruins. A coffin stand is a simple stone platform or shelf used to rest a coffin during a funeral, common in Irish graveyards where the approach could be long and the ground uneven. It is worth pausing at the east gable and looking back westward across the graveyard, where the layering of the site becomes clearest, from the medieval ruin at your back to the eighteenth-century wall, the older gravestones in the mid-ground, and the open Limerick countryside beyond.