What is recorded here

Graiguenamanagh keeps its dead beneath ordinary streets because the abbey graveyard once stretched wider than the current wall. Road works and sewer upgrades keep reopening that forgotten margin, pulling up adult bones and displaced fragments from medieval grave-cuts. The town believes it is laying pipe or widening a lane, but it is also disturbing a place where Cistercian life still continues in marker-less rows.

During works in 2001 to upgrade Graiguenamanagh's sewerage system, archaeological monitoring in Chapel Street uncovered a number of burials outside the current graveyard's NE boundary wall (Cleary 2003, 207). The graveyard serves the RC church which is a restored Cistercian abbey church (KK029-018001-). An excavation (01E0949) uncovered the remains of approximately 15 adult and some displaced bone, presumably from successive burials (ibid.). One section where the burials were particularly concentrated had two to three successive burials and associated simple grave-cuts (ibid.). The medieval burial ground associated with the abbey is recorded as being SE of the abbey, however, there is a record of burials being discovered, from the 19th century onwards, during road repairs and road-widening at the junction of Chapel Street and Barrow Lane (ibid.). These burials are among a number which have been uncovered at the junction of Chapel Street and Barrow Lane in road widening and repair schemes from the mid-19th century onwards (Farrelly et al. 1993, vol. 1, 156). Compiled by: Jean Farrelly Date of upload: 16 March 2022

The monument record does not grant public access. Check the route and ask the landowner before entering private land.