Grave Yard, Maddockstown, Co. Kilkenny

Co. Kilkenny |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Maddockstown, Co. Kilkenny

A roughly triangular graveyard on a west-facing slope in County Kilkenny contains, at its centre, the remains of a medieval church, yet the oldest legible gravestones date only to the 18th century.

That gap between the age of the building and the age of the markers is common enough in Irish burial grounds, where earlier stones were reused, lost, or simply never carved, but it gives this place an odd layered quality: the church fabric speaks to the medieval period while the inscribed record begins centuries later.

The site is enclosed by a stone wall and measures roughly 40 metres east to west and 35 metres north to south. A public road runs along its north-eastern edge, where the entrance is located, and just inside that entrance, to the south, sits a medieval font, a stone basin used for baptismal water, which has survived in the open air long after the church it belonged to fell out of regular use. A pedestrian lane along the north-western boundary was once a working road serving a 17th-century watermill on the River Nore; that mill is now disused, and the lane leads nowhere in particular, though its line in the landscape still traces the old connection between the parish site and the river below. Trees and a rise in the ground limit what can be seen from the surrounding area, giving the whole enclosure a quietly self-contained quality that suits its long, uneven history.

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