Graveyard, Shanagarry, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Shanagarry, Co. Cork

A Church of Ireland building once stood at the northern end of this walled graveyard east of Shanagarry village, clearly marked on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842.

Today there is no visible trace of it above ground. The rectangular enclosure, roughly thirty metres by forty, survives intact behind its stone wall, but whatever the church contributed to the landscape has been entirely reclaimed by earth and time.

The ground here carries a considerably older history than that vanished nineteenth-century building. This is the site of the ancient parish church of Kilmahon, and by 1615 that earlier structure was already recorded as being in ruins. The Church of Ireland church erected in 1800 was therefore a later intervention on a site with medieval roots. In the early years of the twentieth century it was still described as a weather-beaten Protestant church in active use, which makes its complete disappearance all the more striking. The graveyard itself preserves some of what remains: the earliest inscribed headstones date from the 1740s, and there are also chest tombs, the flat-lidded box-shaped grave monuments common in Irish churchyards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The site sits on the western side of a laneway, about five hundred metres east of Shanagarry village. Visitors approaching on foot along the lane should look for the enclosing stone wall, which remains the most legible feature of the site. The headstones from the 1740s and the chest tombs are worth examining closely for inscriptions, as they represent the oldest dateable material still visible at a place where the layers of religious and community history run considerably deeper than the ground currently shows.

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