Memorial stone, Kilcommock Glebe, Co. Longford

Co. Longford |

Memorials

Memorial stone, Kilcommock Glebe, Co. Longford

Set into the eastern wall of a graveyard in County Longford, flanking its gateway, are two limestone plaques that most passers-by would likely read past without pause.

The southern of the pair measures roughly half a metre square, and its inscription, carved in raised Roman capitals, is not a commemoration of the dead buried within. It is a declaration by the living, specifically by the man who paid for the walls themselves.

The text is in Latin and reads, in translation: "Pray for reverend father Hubert Cahill, vicar of Kildacomock and Shrule, who had these walls of the cemetery of Kildacomock made at his own expense in the year of our Lord 1649." That date carries weight. By 1649, Ireland was in the grip of the Cromwellian conquest; the Catholic clergy were under severe and often violent pressure, and the public display of Catholic devotional Latin on a freshly built graveyard wall was not a neutral act. Cahill served as vicar of two parishes, Kildacomock and Shrule, and whatever the circumstances pressing in around him, he chose that particular year to build, to inscribe, and to ask posterity for prayers. The formula "suis expensis fieri fecit", meaning he caused this to be made at his own expense, is a phrase with a long tradition in ecclesiastical building patronage, typically found on much grander projects. Here it appears on a modest parish boundary wall in Longford, which gives it a quietly defiant quality.

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