Graveyard, Kilmog, Co. Kilkenny
Co. Kilkenny |
Burial Grounds
Some graveyards announce themselves with tilting headstones and mossy enclosures.
This one in the townland of Kilmog, County Kilkenny, announces itself with nothing at all. At ground level there is no visible trace of it, only a field running alongside a road, and the memory preserved in a place name.
The townland name itself carries the evidence. Kilmogga, in Irish, means 'the church of St. Magadh', and a 13th-century charter already knew about this church, suggesting it had been established long enough by then to be worth recording in a legal document. Writing in 1905, the historian William Carrigan, drawing on John O'Donovan's Ordnance Survey letters of 1839, located the vanished churchyard with some precision. A gravel pit sitting five to ten metres behind a holy tree and a bullaun stone, which is a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows worn or carved into it, traditionally associated with early Christian and pre-Christian ritual, marked what local tradition held to be the site of the obliterated churchyard. Carrigan was confident: here, he concluded, must have stood the ancient church from which the whole townland took its name. The gravel pit itself appeared on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1839 and was still visible on the 1947 revision, in the field immediately south of what the maps call St. Patrick's Bush.
What remains today is a cluster of associated features, the holy tree, the bullaun stone, the field, and a name that has quietly carried the saint's memory for the better part of a millennium, long after the church and its graveyard ceased to exist in any form that the eye can find.