Graveyard, Stradbally North, Co. Limerick

Co. Limerick |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Stradbally North, Co. Limerick

Two churches share one graveyard here, separated by several centuries and an entire religious rupture, yet occupying the same rectangular plot of ground in Stradbally North as though nothing unusual had happened.

The arrangement is striking once you notice it: the ruins of a medieval parish church sit in the eastern quadrant of the older enclosure, while a nineteenth-century Church of Ireland building occupies the western side, the two structures facing each other across the grass with the dead of many generations between them.

The medieval ruins are recorded as the parish church of Castleconnell, catalogued under the Sites and Monuments Record reference LI001-002001-. The original graveyard, roughly 45 metres north to south and 68 metres east to west, is enclosed by a stone wall built after 1700, though the church it surrounds is considerably older. At some point the Church of Ireland erected its own building within the same precinct, and the graveyard was subsequently extended northward and eastward, more than doubling in area to approximately 91 metres by 145 metres. The memorials within range from the eighteenth century to the present day, meaning the site has been in continuous use across the entire period during which Ireland's religious and political landscape was transformed several times over.

The graveyard lies in Stradbally North, County Limerick, and is accessible for those willing to look carefully at what is in front of them rather than passing through quickly. The contrast between the roofless medieval shell in the east and the more intact nineteenth-century church in the west repays a slow circuit of the enclosure. The older boundary wall, post-1700 but clearly demarcating the original plot, is still visible and gives a sense of the original footprint before the later extension. Memorial inscriptions from the 1700s onwards are scattered throughout, and the layering of different periods, different denominations, and different building phases all within one modest rectangular field makes this a quietly instructive place to spend time.

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Pete F
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