OLD CHURCHYARD KNOWN AS ST. JOHN'S - DUBLIN ROAD KILKENNY 13/08/2018

This old churchyard is known as St. John’s and it is located on Dublin Road. I visited this graveyard a number of times but the weather has always been bad and the light was usually poor but this year things were much better however during this visit I limited myself to using a fast 85mm lens. The colour of the gravestones is different to what I normally see in Irish graveyards [orange/brown rather than grey/white ] The graveyard is very open and there many signs of anti-social behaviour but on balance I would guess that much of the decline and decay of the graves is natural rather than as a result of vandalism. In some cases the collapse of gravestones and monuments may be as a result of poor workmanship or poor quality materials. I suppose the dead are not in a position to complain. Is is described as being “a picturesque graveyard forming an appealing feature in the streetscape on the road leading out of Kilkenny to the south-east. Having origins in a fourteenth-century leper hospital the grounds are of special significance as the location of a seventeenth-century Catholic chapel, thereby representing an early ecclesiastical site in the locality: furthermore it is believed that fragments survive spanning the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, thereby emphasising the archaeological importance of the site. The graveyard remains of additional importance for the associations with a number of Kilkenny's foremost dignitaries or personalities while a collection of cut-stone markers displaying expert stone masonry identify the considerable artistic design.”