Graveyard, Moatfarrell, Co. Longford
Co. Longford |
Burial Grounds
The oval outline of this graveyard in Moatfarrell, County Longford, quietly preserves a shape that has little to do with the memorials inside it.
The headstones date from the 19th and 20th centuries, but the boundary wall enclosing them, running roughly 63 metres north to south and 53 metres east to west, may be tracing a far older perimeter. In early medieval Ireland, ecclesiastical enclosures were routinely laid out in rounded or oval forms, demarcating sacred ground from the surrounding landscape. When that boundary survived as a field wall or graveyard perimeter, it could outlast by many centuries the community that first drew it.
The site is associated with a medieval church, and the possibility noted by Lennon in 2005 is that the present stone wall follows, or at least approximates, the line of an original ecclesiastical enclosure. Such enclosures once defined monastic and church settlements across Ireland, serving simultaneously as spiritual boundaries and practical demarcations of sanctuary. The entrance, a wrought-iron gate set between cut-stone piers at the east-north-east, is conventional enough in itself, but the oval geometry it opens into is the more telling detail. That orientation, entering from the east, also echoes early Christian practice, where the eastern aspect carried liturgical significance.
A visitor approaching the site will find a graveyard that reads, at first glance, as an ordinary rural burial ground. The interest lies in stepping back and taking in the overall form, the way the wall curves continuously rather than meeting at right angles, and in considering that the 19th-century stonemason who built or rebuilt it may have been following ground that had been marked out a thousand years earlier.