Mayne Grave Yard, Jenkinstown, Co. Kilkenny

Not overgrown, not forgotten in the usual sense, but physically swept away by a flood. What survives at Mayne is a narrow strip of ground on a high gravel bluff above a bend in the Dinin River, roughly sixty metres long and no more than seventeen metres wide at its broadest point, with fragments of the southern and western boundary walls still holding their line. The views across the valley are wide and clear in every direction, which makes the truncated quality of the site all the more striking. You are looking at a place that was once larger, until the river took the rest of it.

The church associated with this ground, known as Teampall Maon, was already old enough to appear on the Down Survey parish map of 'Mayne' made between 1655 and 1656, one of the earliest systematic cartographic surveys of Ireland, commissioned under Cromwellian administration to catalogue confiscated land. By 1839, when the Ordnance Survey Letters were being compiled, a local correspondent recorded that the east gable of Teampall Maon had stood on the northern bank of the Dinin until four years previously, that is, around 1835, when it was swept away along with a large portion of the graveyard by what the account calls "one of the mountain torrents" of the river. The townland itself was recorded under two names, Jenkinstown and the older alias Corcalagh, a bilingual doubling that quietly signals how long this ground had been in use. The graveslabs that remain visible today appear to date from the nineteenth century, the earlier material presumably carried off in the same flood that took the gable wall.