Burial ground, Gortnaclohy, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Gortnaclohy, Co. Cork

Near the busy junction of High Street and Chapel Street in Skibbereen, a small walled burial ground sits quietly behind a gateway on Chapel Lane, seldom visited and easy to overlook.

It is a Protestant graveyard, and its modest scale and infrequent use give it a stillness that is quite different from the larger, more trafficked graveyards in the town. Inside, a few headstones and chest tombs, the latter being wide rectangular stone boxes placed over a grave rather than upright markers, survive in varying states of weathering.

The site appears under two different names on successive Ordnance Survey maps, recorded as Chapel Grave Yard on the first edition and shortened to the bare Grave Yd. on the second, a small shift that hints at the gradual fading of the place from local consciousness. The historian Burke noted it as early as 1918, and later survey work in the 1990s confirmed the walled frontage along Chapel Lane and the gateway positioned at the north-west corner of the enclosure. The naming on the earlier map is slightly curious, given that it is a Protestant rather than a Catholic burial ground, though chapel was a term applied loosely to places of Protestant worship in Ireland during the period when many of the surviving Ordnance Survey sheets were first drawn up.

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