Graveyard, Dunnaman, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard so thoroughly consumed by scrub vegetation that proper examination of its interior is, according to the National Monuments record, simply impossible.
That is the quiet reality of this roughly rectangular enclosure in County Limerick, sitting in open grassland roughly 370 metres northeast of Dunnaman Castle. The wall that surrounds it is post-medieval in construction, but what lies within and beneath is considerably older, and what lies beyond its edges is older still.
The southern quadrant of the enclosure contains the ruins of a medieval nave and chancel church, the kind of two-part arrangement common to rural Irish ecclesiastical sites from the early Norman period onward, where the nave housed the congregation and the chancel was reserved for the clergy and altar. But the church ruins and the graveyard wall are only the most visible layers here. Aerial photography from Digital Globe satellites has revealed earthworks in the fields immediately to the north, east, and south of the graveyard, and these are interpreted as the surviving traces of an earlier ecclesiastical enclosure, predating the stone wall entirely. Such enclosures, typically curvilinear in plan, were a feature of early medieval Christian sites in Ireland, defining sacred space around a church or monastic cell long before mortared walls became the norm. The site was compiled and revised by Caimin O'Brien, with the record last updated in March 2019.
The graveyard is accessed through an entrance gate at the northern end of the western wall, and there is also a stone stile set into the centre of the southern wall. A section of the western wall has collapsed at its midpoint, which gives some sense of the general condition of the place. The dense scrub covering the interior makes any close reading of the ground surface or surviving grave markers extremely difficult, so visitors should temper expectations accordingly. The church ruins in the southern section are the most coherent remains visible, and the surrounding fields, particularly to the north and east, reward a slower look for any subtle undulation in the ground that might correspond to the earlier enclosure boundary recorded from the air.