Ridge Grave Yard, Borris Little, Co. Laois

The ridge itself gave the place its name, and what makes it quietly unsettling is not what is there but what is absent: eighteenth and nineteenth century headstones crowd a rectangular enclosure measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 145 metres east to west, yet no church survives, and no firm record explains how far back the burials go.

By 1907, when O'Hanlon and O'Leary wrote about it, the site was already described as an ancient graveyard with no trace of a former church remaining. Local tradition, recorded separately by O'Dooley, placed a church somewhere in the immediate vicinity, specifically behind what was then Mr Brown's shop on the Ridge Road, though nothing of it has been identified. Researchers working on the Urban Survey in 1986 noted that the date of the cemetery is unknown and raised the possibility that it represents a pre-plantation church site, perhaps even the church of the Newtown of Leys, a medieval settlement whose exact history remains incompletely understood. The stone wall enclosing the graveyard is of post-medieval date, suggesting the present layout was formalised relatively late, even if the ground beneath it may have been in use far earlier. A plaque on the wall records that burials ceased here in 1897, when a new cemetery dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul was opened in Portlaoise to serve the growing town.