Graveyard, Clogher Demesne, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Clogher Demesne, Co. Cork

A subcircular graveyard is an unusual shape to find in the Irish countryside, where most burial grounds follow the rectangular logic of field boundaries and property lines.

This one, on the south side of a road in Clogher Demesne, measures roughly 67 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west, enclosed partly by a low roadside wall and partly by a stone-faced earthen bank. Near its southern centre sits the ruin of the parish church of Templeroan, and tucked just inside the western road wall is a subrectangular depression that the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map labels as a "Pound", the term for an enclosure where stray livestock were held until their owners paid a fine to reclaim them. Finding a pound apparently embedded within, or immediately adjacent to, a graveyard boundary is the kind of quietly odd detail that tends to get smoothed over in the landscape.

The burials cluster to the south of and within the church ruin, the earliest headstone so far noted carrying a date of 1783. But the Nagle family, evidently a local presence of some consequence, appear earlier and more prominently. Writing in his multi-volume survey of Cork antiquities published between 1905 and 1925, the antiquarian Grove White recorded a Nagle headstone to the north of the church dated 1723. Two chest tombs, a chest tomb being a raised box-shaped monument set above ground level rather than flush with it, sit directly over the church's north wall. The easternmost of these is identified as the Nagle family tomb and bears the date 1796, placing it against the wall of a church that was already a ruin by that point, or becoming one, the family choosing to mark their grave against the fabric of the older building rather than anywhere else in the yard.

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