Graveyard, Threemilewater, Co. Wicklow

Co. Wicklow |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Threemilewater, Co. Wicklow

Most graveyards are rectangular, their boundaries following the practical geometry of enclosure and ownership.

The one at Threemilewater, in County Wicklow, takes a different shape: sub-triangular, running roughly 75 metres north to south and 50 metres across at its widest northern end before tapering away to the south. It is the kind of irregularity that tends to preserve something older within it, the outline of a boundary that predates the tidy stone wall now marking its edges.

In the north-east corner stand the remains of a church, and it is almost certainly this building that gave the ground its original purpose and, in all likelihood, its unusual footprint. The headstones scattered across the site date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by which point the church itself had already fallen into ruin. The pairing is common enough across rural Ireland: a community continuing to bury its dead in ground made sacred by a building that no longer functioned, sometimes for generations after the roof had gone.

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