site of Templesillagh Grave Yard, Castletown, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Grounds
On a low-lying stretch of pasture in County Wexford, there is a graveyard that exists almost entirely as an absence.
No stone marks the ground, no boundary wall survives, no earthwork breaks the surface. What is known of Templesillagh Grave Yard comes largely from a single cartographic ghost: a faint circular enclosure, roughly 35 metres in diameter, sketched onto the 1839 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map and labelled in italic lettering, the convention used to denote antiquities or features no longer extant. Even then, the map did not record a functioning burial ground but its site, suggesting that by the time the surveyors passed through, the place had already slipped out of living memory and into archaeology.
The name itself carries traces of an older religious landscape. "Temple" in Irish placenames typically derives from the word for a church, often a small early medieval foundation, and "Sillagh" may preserve a personal name or a local word now difficult to recover with certainty. The circular form noted on the Ordnance Survey map is consistent with an early ecclesiastical enclosure, the kind of roughly circular or oval boundary that frequently surrounded early Irish church sites and their associated burial grounds. These enclosures were not always walled or ditched; sometimes they were defined by little more than custom and memory, which may explain why this one has left so little trace. The Dooroge stream runs approximately 250 metres to the east, the sort of proximity to water that is common at early church sites across Ireland. Beyond that, the documentary record is thin.