What is recorded here

Under the modern carpark and park grass, three post-medieval people still lie buried in the old Deanery Orchard, just forty metres from St Canice’s Cathedral. One adult rests fifteen metres outside the cathedral graveyard wall, head pointing west beside eighteenth- or nineteenth-century red pottery, while an infant and another person lie together in the orchard’s western compartment. They were probably not lost churchyard burials but extra-mural interments, set into garden soil when the orchard belonged to the deanery. Today cars circle them and children run across grass that once held fruit trees, yet the dead remain where they were placed, patient beneath a city that has forgotten them.

Three post-medieval human burials uncovered in two separate archaeological test-excavations by Andrew Gittens (02E0485) and Cóilín Ó Drisceoil (06E0306) in a former walled garden known as the 'Deanery Orchard', now a park and carpark, 40m SE of St Canice's Cathedral (KK019-026029-) (Gittins 2004, 272-3; Ó Drisceoil 2006, unpublished; 2009, 273-5).The Deanery Orchard site is depicted, almost exactly as it appears today, on John Rocque’s 1758 map of Kilkenny, the only difference being the division of the area into three enclosures by stone fences that were added in the 19th century. Before it was the orchard for the Deanery (KK019-026033-) on the opposite (W) side of Coach Road (built 1690), it formed part of the plot of the manse house (KK019-026106-) for the precentor of the cathedral in the Cathedral Close. A single isolated human burial was discovered in the NE of the Deanery Orchard, 15m outside (to S of) the present boundary wall of St Canice’s graveyard (KK019-026171-) during the test-excavations. This was an extended inhumation of an adult (sex unknown) orientated E-W, with the head to the W. Its grave-cut (1.6m E-W x 0.75m N-S) contained glazed red earthenware pottery of 18th/19th-century date and was dug into a post-medieval cultivation soil. Two further burials, an E-W orientated infant with its head to the W, and an adjacent burial identified by its partially exposed grave-cut, were located in the centre of the main, W, compartment of the Deanery Orchard (Gittins 2004, 272-3). Rather than indicating the graveyard extended into the Deanery Orchard these burials can probably be regarded as an outlying, extra-mural, interments. The burials were all preserved in situ. Compiled by: Cóilín Ó Drisceoil Date of upload: 5 November 2020

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