Burial ground, Killinure, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Killinure, Co. Wicklow

On a quiet south-easterly slope at Killinure in County Wicklow, there is a graveyard that leaves almost no trace of itself.

No headstones break the surface, no boundary wall announces itself to a passing walker. The site is, as the record puts it plainly, not visible at ground level. What remains is essentially an absence, an oval patch of ground, roughly fifty metres across from east to west and forty metres from north to south, where the dead were once laid and the land has since closed over them.

The clearest evidence for the place comes not from anything physical you can see today, but from a cartographic moment frozen in 1838, when the Ordnance Survey produced its first detailed six-inch maps of Ireland. The surveyors marked the oval enclosure and labelled it 'Site of Grave Yard', a phrasing that already suggests the place was understood, even then, as something former rather than active. The oval shape is significant in its own quiet way. Oval or roughly circular enclosures of this kind in Ireland often reflect very early ecclesiastical or pre-Norman burial traditions, where a curving boundary ditch or bank defined consecrated ground long before rectangular churchyard walls became the norm. At Killinure, whatever once marked that boundary has long since disappeared into the slope.

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Pete F
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