Sites and Monuments Record · Ireland
Graveyard
Rathmolyon, County Meath, Ireland
The record
- Townland
- Rathmolyon
- County
- Meath
- Country
- Ireland
- First-edition OS map
- Indicated
- Latest-edition OS map
- Grave Yd.
- Coordinates
- 53.48773, -6.80289
- SMR number
- ME042-020001-
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.
David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries
Shown on 4 historical map sheets, the earliest the 1790 "Composite: Ireland." (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries).
This record in the National Monuments Service's Historic Environment Viewer ↗
The National Monuments Service's description
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;
References
Shine, D. 2009 Final Report on Archaeological Excavations at Rathmolyon, Co. Meath. Licence: 07E0922. Unpublished report, CRDS
Shine, D. and Travers, C. 2011 An interesting burial in Rathmolyon, Co. Meath (an osteological note) Ríocht na Mídhe 22, 102-112.
Nearby in the register
- Ringfort - rathunder 1 mi
- Churchunder 1 mi
- Settlement clusterunder 1 mi
- Metalworking siteunder 1 mi
Other entries of the same register within about three miles of this one, by straight line.