Graveyard in Rathmolyon

Situated on a slight rise in a fairly level landscape. The site of the medieval parish church of Rathmolyon (ME042-020----) is within a subrectangular graveyard (dims c. 75m NW-SE: c. 45m NE-SW at NW to c. 80m NE-SW at S) defined by masonry walls, with headstones dating from c. 1780 to the present. Archaeological testing and excavation (07E0922) by D. Shine of trenches for a water pipe encountered human remains on the W side of the N-S road that is W of the graveyard (excavations.ie 2008:960, 961). Two burials, one of a woman with a smoker’s kit including flint nodule, strike-a-light and a pipe bowl dated c. 1640-1660, were recorded. The other burial, a probable male, yielded a C14 date of 1410-1470 cal. AD. A ditch roughly parallel with the W graveyard wall may be an earlier version of this boundary. A clay-bonded wall and its robber trench on the line of the S graveyard wall indicates that the road truncates a graveyard that originally extended further W, and ditches on the same line are probably earlier than the wall. On the 1836 edition of the OS 6-inch map a rectangular area W of the road is included with the unidentified graveyard (total dims c. 180m NE-SW; c. 75m NW-SE) and described as the ‘Vicarial Glebe’. The cobbled surface of a road (L c. 65m) found in the trench stops short of the graveyard as represented on a Scalé map of 1767, but the current extension to the cross-roads had been achieved by 1812 according to Larkin’s map. Archaeological testing (21E0315) by C. Coffey and F. Murtagh c. 170m to the W of the graveyard at the closest point produced no related material (excavations.ie 2022:433). (Shine 2009) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 23 March, 2015 Amended: 26 April, 2021; 2 May 2023;