Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
At the western end of Ballymadun graveyard in Glebe, north County Dublin, a set of medieval church remains sits quietly among the headstones, older by several centuries than almost everything around it.
The graveyard itself measures roughly 60 metres by 50 metres and is bounded by a sub-rectangular rubble limestone wall built after 1700, its stone capping now showing signs of mortar wash-out and bulging in places, the kind of slow structural drift that accumulates over generations of frost and rain. The site sits to the southwest of the present St Joseph's Catholic Church, a relationship that reflects a pattern common across Irish parishes, where Catholic congregations eventually built new churches nearby but continued to use older, pre-existing burial grounds.
The medieval church at the western end of the enclosure predates the graveyard wall by an unknown but considerable margin, representing the earlier parish church of Ballymadun. The oldest legible gravestone in the yard dates to 1729 and commemorates a Thomas Callan, identified through the Fingal Historic Graveyards survey of 2008. That survey built on an earlier assessment carried out by Egan in 1992, suggesting the site has attracted sufficient scholarly attention to be recorded twice over. The broader collection of stones spans from the eighteenth century through to the present day, giving the graveyard an unusual temporal range, with the medieval ruins at one end and comparatively recent memorials scattered throughout.
Access to the graveyard is through an entrance gate and a stone stile set into the northeast angle of the surrounding wall. A stone stile is essentially a set of stepped stones built into a wall to allow people to climb over without disturbing the structure, a practical feature that appears frequently in older Irish enclosures. There is a notable drop in ground level to the west and south of the site, so the approach from those directions gives a clearer sense of the enclosure rising above the surrounding land. The mix of headstone styles across three centuries rewards a slow walk through, and the church remains at the western end are worth examining closely for the quality of the surviving stonework.