What is recorded here

Killavoogue, or Kilmogue Grave Yard for Children, stands on a grassy ridge in County Kilkenny, marking the quiet burial place of still-born and very young infants. A low circular bank encloses the vanished church, holding small lives that never entered ordinary memory. The grave yard remains a tender boundary between forgetting and honour, preserving what tenderness refused to lose.

On the E side and just below the crest of a N-S ridge between two valleys, in rolling grassland. There are excellent views in all directions. According to Carrigan (1905, vol. 3, 466), this church is 'known to the local Irish speakers as Killavoogue'. It is indicated on the 1st (1839) ed. OS 6-inch map as, 'Kilmogue Grave Yard for Children' and is described in the OS Letters (1839) as, ‘a small enclosure like a low rath a little to the south of the old Church in the townland of Ballyfoyle, which the people call Cill Mogue (the Cell of Maodhoge); there remains no appearance of a building but they make it the place of sepulture of still-born or very young infants’ (O'Flanagan ed. 1930, vol. 1, 31 (11)). A roughly circular graveyard (diam. c. 50m) defined by a very low bank (Wth c. 1.5m; H 0.1-0.2m) encloses the remains of the church (KK014-021001-). The bank is not evident in the E quadrant where the ground level drops down towards a stream. Compiled by: Jean Farrelly Date of upload: 18 May 2020

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