Grave Yard, Stonecarthy, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
By 1839, when Ordnance Survey officers were recording the parishes of County Kilkenny, the graveyard at Stonecarthy was already being described as an unfrequented burying ground, a phrase that carries a particular weight when you consider the site had probably been in continuous use since the medieval period.
That quiet neglect, noted so plainly in the OS Letters, seems to have settled over the place permanently.
The graveyard sits on a west-facing slope in Co. Kilkenny, its views opening out to the west and north. It is small, raised, and roughly oval in shape, measuring around 48 metres on its northeast-to-southwest axis and about 28 metres across. A stone wall encloses it, with an entrance at the southern end of the western side. At its centre stands a medieval church, and in the eastern portion of the enclosure there is a medieval graveslab, a flat carved stone of the kind that would once have marked an individual burial with some degree of status or commemoration. One detail about the site resists easy explanation: the eastern end of the graveyard sits noticeably lower than the rest, which suggests the ground there was excavated at some point, though when and why is not recorded. It is the kind of alteration that raises questions a landscape alone cannot answer.