What is recorded here

Thirty metres of collapsed wall enclose more than twenty buried bodies, some laid down before the church rose and others so small they may have been children lost in later centuries. Duignan dug through that layered darkness in the 1950s, pulling up skeletons stretched out on their backs and one curled like a person trying to hold itself together. The graveyard has kept both ancient and newer grief inside the same square, waiting for rain, foottraffic and forgetting to decide what it remembers.

Within the ecclesiastical enclosure (GA103-1390002-) at Kiltiernan. This graveyard, located just to the E of centre of the enclosure, is defined by a roughly square enclosure (c. 30m N-S; c. 30m E-W) which is delimited by a collapsed double-faced wall. A church (GA103-139001-) is located in its SW half. A series of excavations carried out in and around the church by Duignan in 1950, 1951 and 1953 revealed over 20 burials (Waddell and Clyne 1995, 149-203). Apart from one burial with the knees drawn up towards the stomach, all the others consisted of fully extended skeletons laid on their backs (Duignan 1951, 73-5). Some of the burials pre-dated the church and a number of infant and neonate burials suggested that graveyard was also used in more recent times as a children’s burial ground. The limited range of artefacts produced from the excavations suggests a date for the early medieval period, possibly as early as the 9th century, as well as the medieval and post-medieval periods (Waddell and Clyne ibid.). Compiled by: Olive Alcock Date of upload: 8 February 2018

Medieval Christian graveyard; associated with a monastic or ecclesiastical site. Its location within an ecclesiastical enclosure suggests it was used for burial by a local religious community, reflecting early Christian settlement patterns in Ireland.

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