(Site of) Grave Yard, Ballyclogh, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
Beneath a west-facing pasture slope in Ballyclogh, County Wicklow, lie the remains of a graveyard and church that have entirely vanished from the surface.
There is nothing to see at ground level, no headstones, no rubble, no depression in the turf suggesting what once stood here. The site exists now almost entirely as a cartographic memory.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded both a grave yard and a church at this location, and crucially showed them sitting within a circular enclosure roughly 55 metres across at its widest point. That circular boundary is significant. In early medieval Ireland, ecclesiastical sites were frequently enclosed within a roughly circular or oval boundary, known as a cashel when built in stone or simply as a rath-like enclosure in earthen form, demarcating sacred ground from the surrounding landscape. The presence of such an enclosure, even noted only on a nineteenth-century map, points toward a settlement of considerable age, quite possibly pre-Norman. The reference in Liam Price's 1967 work on Wicklow place-names and antiquities confirms the site was known to local antiquarians, but even by that point the physical remains had apparently left no trace above the grass.