Grave Yard, Danesfort, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
The entrance to this graveyard at Danesfort now opens onto a road that effectively goes nowhere.
The old Kilkenny to Stonyford route, which once carried traffic past the western gate, was bypassed when the N10 was realigned, leaving that original stretch of road as a quiet remnant, still there but no longer going anywhere in particular. It is a small detail, but it gives the site an oddly suspended quality, as though the outside world quietly withdrew and left the graveyard to its own business.
The graveyard itself is a fairly substantial rectangle, roughly 80 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, and tucked into its north-east corner stands a medieval church. Writing in 1905, the Kilkenny historian William Carrigan noted several headstones dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with something considerably older inside the church: a medieval graveslab. A graveslab of this type is typically a flat stone monument, often carved with a cross or effigy, laid over or near a burial and common across Irish ecclesiastical sites from the medieval period. The fact that one survives here, documented by Carrigan over a century ago, suggests the site retained fragments of its medieval character long after the church itself fell out of use.