Graveyard, Kilpipe, Co. Wicklow
Co. Wicklow |
Burial Grounds
What makes this graveyard at Kilpipe quietly arresting is not the burial ground itself but what surrounds it and what sits just beyond it.
The site occupies level ground on the summit of a small ridge running northeast to southwest, and within about 150 metres to the northeast stands a motte, the flat-topped earthen mound raised by Norman lords in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the foundation for a timber castle. Church, graveyard, and motte in such close proximity suggest a landscape shaped by deliberate early medieval and later Norman occupation of the same commanding ground.
The graveyard is roughly rectangular, measuring around 40 metres by 30 metres, with the remains of a church along its western side. Its boundary is defined by an earth and stone bank up to 1.6 metres high and about 2 metres wide, faced on the outside with drystone walling. Running along the outer edge of that bank is a fosse, a defensive or demarcating ditch, roughly 1.8 metres wide and half a metre deep. This combination of bank, facing, and fosse is typical of early ecclesiastical enclosures in Ireland, where such boundaries served to define sacred space as much as to mark ownership or provide protection. The whole arrangement reads less like a casual field boundary and more like a deliberate statement about the significance of the ground enclosed.