Site of Grave Yard, Killadangan, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Burial Grounds
On the eastern bank of the Colligan River in County Waterford, there is a graveyard that exists only as a cartographic memory. No headstones break the surface, no boundary wall survives, and nothing visible at ground level hints that this was ever a place of burial. What remains is a mark on a map and a brief description: traces of a circular feature.
The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded this spot as the site of a graveyard, situated roughly seventy metres from the river and about forty metres south of what was then a working corn mill. The circular outline noted by the Reverend P. Power in his 1952 study of Decies placenames is characteristic of early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where a roughly circular boundary, sometimes earthen, sometimes ditched, defined a sacred or burial precinct. Such enclosures often predate the medieval period and can persist in the landscape long after any associated church has disappeared entirely. At Killadangan, even that trace has gone. The mill buildings nearby offer a faint sense of the working landscape that once surrounded the site, but the graveyard itself has been absorbed completely into the ground.