Grave Yard, Forest, Co. Wexford
Co. Wexford |
Burial Grounds
Around 130 people are buried in this walled plot on a slope northeast of Taghmon, and yet only about ten headstones survive.
That disproportion is not neglect; it is doctrine. The Society of Friends, more commonly known as Quakers, traditionally buried their dead beneath plain, unmarked mounds, rejecting the ostentation of carved memorial stones as incompatible with their principles of simplicity and equality in death. What remains here is a field of low grass mounds, most of them anonymous, with a handful of modest stones dating from roughly 1860 to 1920 representing the later, slightly more accommodating period of Quaker burial practice. The meeting house that once stood beside the burial ground has vanished entirely, leaving only the bases of two granite columns as evidence it was ever there.
The Quaker meeting at this place, recorded as both Forrest and Lambstown, was established in 1666, making it one of the earlier Friends' meetings in county Wexford. The meeting house itself came much later, built in 1783 on land leased from Isaac Cullimore of Newtown to Jacob Goff and the Friends. By 1841 the congregation had dwindled or consolidated enough that the Forest meeting was united with the Wexford town meeting, a common fate for rural Quaker communities across Ireland as the eighteenth-century population of Friends contracted through emigration and attrition. The enclosed site, roughly 80 metres by 60 metres and bounded by a two-metre masonry wall, is divided internally by a further wall, with the meeting house having occupied the smaller, road-facing section nearest the entrance gate.
The entrance gate with its stone piers sits on the southeast, road-facing side, and the burial ground occupies the larger portion of the plot behind where the meeting house stood. The two granite column bases are easy to miss, sitting low among the grass, but they mark the footprint of a building that served a community here for nearly sixty years before the congregation was absorbed elsewhere.
