Burial Ground

Eight people, perhaps more, lie stretched out beneath the Aghade sand, their heads turned north as if still watching the sunrise. They had no coins, no rings, no stones to mark them, only the plain faith that the body should face the light. A digging machine opened the ground in 1949 for sand, not prayer, and the men taken from it disappeared again under the wheels and haste of the day. The cemetery is small enough to walk across in a minute, yet it keeps what County Carlow still forgets: that the dead do not need monument when the living remember the direction they faced.