Graveyard in Ballycahillroe

Ballycahillroe in County Westmeath holds a graveyard marked by a curving wall, a shape Swan noticed in 1988 that suggests an older ecclesiastical enclosure rather than an ordinary boundary. The curve resists the blunt lines of later burial practice, implying that the land was shaped for worship before it became a place for the dead. That much is visible; the rest belongs to imagination. A church may have stood there, its people coming and going until only the wall remembered the turn of the building it once followed.