Kilmaglish Grave Yard, Kilmaglish, Co. Westmeath

Co. Westmeath |

Burial Grounds

Kilmaglish Grave Yard, Kilmaglish, Co. Westmeath

A small D-shaped graveyard tucked into woodland along a Westmeath townland boundary is an unremarkable thing in itself, but Kilmaglish carries a quiet puzzle at its centre.

Within its nineteenth-century stone enclosure, roughly thirty metres north to south and thirty-seven metres east to west, stand the remains of what appears to be a Church of Ireland building, probably dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century. That would be ordinary enough, except for one awkward detail: the Down Survey map of Tyfarnan parish, drawn up between 1655 and 1659, shows no church or chapel at this location at all.

The Down Survey was the first systematic, large-scale mapping of Ireland, commissioned by the Cromwellian administration to facilitate the redistribution of confiscated Catholic-owned land. It recorded religious buildings with reasonable thoroughness, which makes their absence here difficult to explain away as simple omission. The church ruins that survive in the northern quadrant of the graveyard either post-date that survey entirely, or replaced a structure so minor it escaped the cartographers' attention. The headstones in the graveyard begin after 1700, which aligns with the later end of that uncertainty. Quarrying has taken place both east and west of the site, so the landscape around it has been shaped and reshaped by industry as much as by devotion, and the woodland setting today lends the whole place a slightly sequestered quality that its roadside position might not suggest.

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