Graveyard, Clogheenduane, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Clogheenduane, Co. Cork

A roughly square walled enclosure on the east side of a laneway in Clogheenduane, Co. Cork, is one of those places where absence is more telling than presence.

The graveyard, about forty metres across, has been closed to burials since 1970, and its inscribed headstones, dating from the early nineteenth century, mark the visible limit of what survives. Everything else that once occupied this cluster of ground has gone entirely, leaving not so much as a foundation course above the soil.

The site carries layers that stretch back well before those headstones were cut. A church of the ancient parish of Templemichael de Duagh stood here, recorded as being in repair in 1639, which suggests a functioning, if modest, place of worship at a time when such things could not be taken for granted in County Cork. A replacement church was built in 1812 on the same ground, in what the topographer Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, called the early English style, a form of Gothic Revival architecture fashionable in the period, characterised by pointed arches and simple lancet windows. Lewis described it as a small handsome edifice, which in the architectural vocabulary of the time indicated something neat and considered rather than grand. That church was demolished in 1884, and by now there is no visible trace of it at the surface. The 1824 Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the church at the northern end of the graveyard; the 1842 edition also shows a glebe house, built in 1814, and a schoolhouse to the south of the enclosure. Those too have been completely removed.

What remains, then, is the graveyard wall, the headstones, and the outline of a place that once anchored a small institutional world, a church, a school, a clergyman's residence, all of which have left the landscape without a trace.

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