Burial Ground, Grange, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
Along a public road in Grange, Co. Kilkenny, a small burial ground was once recorded on a map and then, within sixty years, effectively ceased to exist as a legible feature of the landscape.
That quiet disappearance is itself the most striking thing about it.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed in 1839, marks the site immediately south of the road, showing a roughly semi-circular area of modest dimensions, approximately ten metres northeast to southwest and eight metres northwest to southeast. The boundary is indicated with a dashed line rather than a solid one, suggesting the ground was unenclosed at the time, without a wall or fence to define it physically. It is simply annotated as "Burial Ground". By the time the Ordnance Survey revised its mapping around 1900, the site had been dropped from the record entirely. Contemporary satellite imagery confirms what that omission implies: there is nothing visible above ground today. No kerbing, no headstones, no earthwork. The burial ground has been absorbed back into the surface of the land.