Hospital, Stangs, Co. Kilkenny

A junction, some trees, ordinary ground. But during a thunderstorm sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, a number of those trees were uprooted, and the roots came up with them to reveal skeletons beneath. The dead had been there a very long time.

The site was once a magdalen, a medieval institution combining a hospital and chapel and typically associated with the care of lepers, situated just outside the town walls of Gowran near what was known as the Magdalan Gate. A map of the town dated 1710 to 1711 still marks the gate, giving some sense of where the complex once stood, roughly fifty metres to the north-east. By 1578, the site appears in a royal grant conferring on one Sir Edm. Dowyre, or Downye, custody and oversight of the spittle houses or magdaleines of Leighlin and Gowran, specifically for the relief of the poor leprous people dwelling in those places. Leprosy had been retreating across Europe for some generations by that point, and such grants often reflected the later, broader use of these institutions for the sick and destitute more generally. The chapel attached to the Gowran magdalen survived in some form until around 1840, when its remains were cleared away and trees were planted over the spot. A plague recorded in 1604, from which a great many of the Gowran people died, may account for some of those who ended up beneath those trees, though the burial ground likely accumulated the dead across several centuries.

There is no visible trace of the hospital above ground today. The location is identifiable only by the road junction itself and the documentary record that pins the vanished chapel to that precise angle of diverging roads.