What is recorded here

Indicated is a graveyard holding the probable site of St Finnian's early monastery, where headstones span from 1750 to 2003 while two older markers vanish from memory. The Kilwarden River flows one hundred and seventy metres south, past masonry walls and earthen banks that have guarded the dead since before the eighteenth century. John Hebie and Digby Waddingstone are named in history but absent from the ground, their stones lost to time or theft. The place remembers what it can hold and releases the rest into legend.

Situated on a fairly level landscape with the NW-SE Kilwarden River c. 170m to the S and c. 1.8km W of where the Kilwarden meets a SW-NE section of the River Boyne. The site of St Finnian's parish church and probably of the early monastery of St Finnian (ME047-007----) is within a subrectangular graveyard (max. dims c. 90m NE-SW; c. 38m NW-SE) defined by masonry walls at SW and NW and by earthen banks and trees on the other sides. The medieval font (ME047-007002-) was moved to the Roman Catholic church of St Finnian at Clonard village (ME047-020----), c. 725m to the W, in 1991. There is no evidence of ancient or medieval structures at the graveyard, apart from a face corbel in the tower of the now closed St Finnian's Church of Ireland church that was built in 1808, and a rectangular, flat-bottomed trough (ME047-007003-) of uncertain date and function. The headstones date generally from c. 1750 to c. 2003, but the graveslabs or headstones of John Hebie (1622) and Digby Waddingstone (1692) recorded by FitzGerald (1899) cannot be identified. Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 15 April, 2015

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