site of Grave Yard, Clonough, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Grounds
On a working farm in Clonough, County Wexford, there is a place that appears on an 1839 Ordnance Survey map as a faint circular enclosure, roughly 25 metres across, labelled simply "site of Grave Yard".
No stone, no mound, no visible feature now distinguishes it from the surrounding ground. Yet the local tradition of a burial place here has not entirely dissolved, even as the land has been absorbed into an agricultural complex.
The 1839 OS six-inch map, one of the great early surveys of Irish territory, caught this enclosure at a moment when it was already a memory rather than a functioning site. Circular enclosures of this kind often point to early medieval ecclesiastical use, a pattern familiar across Ireland where small, rounded burial grounds cluster near holy wells and ancient dedications. In this case, St Michael's Well lies approximately 220 metres to the south, a proximity that would fit neatly with that tradition. The site occupies a slight natural shelf above the Clonough River, which runs on a north-northwest to south-southeast axis about 100 metres to the southwest. Archaeological testing carried out roughly 150 metres to the southeast, recorded under licence 08E0997 and reported by Gregory in 2011, produced no material related to the burial ground, leaving its character and date unresolved.