Graveyard, Purcellsinch, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Purcellsinch, Co. Kilkenny

Beneath the concrete and activity of an industrial estate on the eastern edge of Kilkenny city, a graveyard has effectively ceased to exist.

Not destroyed in any dramatic or documented sense, simply gone, leaving behind a ruined medieval church and no other visible trace that the dead were ever laid here.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed in 1839 to 1840, recorded an irregular, unenclosed area of roughly 47 metres east to west and 37 metres north to south, with a church at its centre. Unenclosed graveyards of this kind are not uncommon in the Irish medieval landscape; without a bounding wall to signal their presence and protect their extent, they were always vulnerable to gradual encroachment. By the time the revised map was produced in 1945 to 1946, no graveyard was indicated at all. Today the church survives in a ruinous state, sitting approximately 20 metres south of the Kilkenny to Waterford railway line, inside what is now Purcellsinch industrial estate. There are no grave markers. There is no enclosure.

What makes the site quietly unsettling is precisely that absence. The church remains as a legible, physical object; the graveyard that surrounded it has been absorbed into the landscape so thoroughly that the revised mapping simply stopped recording it. Whether the burials were disturbed, built over, or simply lost beneath accumulated ground level is not recorded. The site sits about 2.5 kilometres east of the medieval city, on a gentle south-facing slope that would once have looked out over a very different kind of working land.

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Pete F
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