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Sites and Monuments Record · Ireland

Graveyard

Rathmolyon, County Meath, Ireland

Ordnance Survey six-inch map, 2nd edition (1888–1915) covering the location of Graveyard, Rathmolyon, County Meath, with a pin at the register's coordinates
Ordnance Survey six-inch map, 2nd edition (1888–1915), covering this location. Courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. The pin is ours, placed from the register's coordinates.

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 Libraries

4 historical maps cover this location, the earliest the 1790 map "Composite: Ireland." (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries).

Historical maps covering this location

  • 1790 · Composite: Ireland. (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
  • 1799 · Ireland. (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
  • 1830 · V.3:11-15:XV. Britisches Reich. C. Kon: Ireland. a. Prov: Leinster. Counties: 1-12 (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)
  • 1891 · Ireland 16 (David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries)

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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

Other entries of the same register within about three miles of this one, by straight line.

Sites and Monuments Record data: National Monuments Service, Government of Ireland, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Record text is reproduced unchanged. National Monuments Service, Government of Ireland · CC BY 4.0
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