Headstone, Mill And Churchquarter, Co. Waterford

Co. Waterford |

Religious Objects

Headstone, Mill And Churchquarter, Co. Waterford

A single headstone in the townland of Mill And Churchquarter has had an unusually complicated existence on paper, quite apart from whatever history it carries in stone. For years it was recorded as a graveslab, a flat grave-marker typically laid horizontally over a burial, but the distinction matters: a headstone stands upright, marking a grave at its head, and the two are different objects with different implications for how a site is read and managed.

The mix-up was eventually traced to a reference by the Reverend P. Power, writing in the Waterford Archaeological Journal in 1898 as part of a wider survey of the county's ancient ruined churches. Power's article, spanning two sections of the journal's fourth volume, was concerned with cataloguing ecclesiastical remains across Waterford, and it was his description that clarified the object's true nature. Once that reference was properly examined, the classification was corrected from graveslab to headstone, and the site was removed from the Record of Monuments and Places, the statutory list maintained since 1995 under which recorded archaeological monuments in Ireland are afforded legal protection. The townland name, Churchquarter, is itself suggestive of early ecclesiastical land division, a type of tenure in which land adjacent to a church was set aside for its upkeep or for the clergy attached to it, and the presence of a marked grave in such a location would be entirely consistent with that pattern.

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