Graveyard

Graveyard, Killeigh, Co. Offaly: A graveyard whose headstones date from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries might seem unremarkable enough, but the one at Killeigh in County Offaly sits at the end of a much longer chain of sacred use. The ground around it has been consecrated, in one form or another, since at least the sixth century, and the buildings that now house a guest house and a Church of Ireland church are the same structures that once formed part of a Franciscan abbey. That abbey itself replaced an earlier Augustinian priory. The layers here are not metaphorical; they are architectural and archaeological, one institution quietly folded into the next over the course of fourteen centuries. The story begins with St.