Grave Yard, Tirkeenan, Co. Monaghan

Co. Monaghan |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Tirkeenan, Co. Monaghan

On the west-facing slope of a drumlin on the edge of Monaghan town, there is a small triangular wedge of ground, roughly fifty metres across, where the N2 road towards Castleshane meets a minor road branching to the north-east.

Nothing marks it out today. No stones, no boundary, no earthwork survives. The only evidence that it was ever a graveyard is a single appearance in italic lettering on the 1834 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, after which it vanishes from the cartographic record entirely.

What happened to the ground immediately to the east of this site gives some sense of why the graveyard may have been lost without trace. Between 1861 and 1892, St Macarthan's Roman Catholic Cathedral was constructed there, a large gothic revival building designed by the architect James Joseph McCarthy and carried out under the successive oversight of Bishops Mac Nally and James Donnelly. Gothic revival was the dominant ecclesiastical style of the period in Ireland, drawing on medieval European church architecture to project permanence and institutional confidence at a time when Catholic building was expanding considerably. The cathedral project was substantial enough to reshape the landscape around it, and it is plausible that the older graveyard was cleared or simply absorbed in the process. Whether the burial ground had any formal connection to a Roman Catholic chapel that stood about 450 metres to the south-east at Latlorcan is unknown; no documentary link between the two has come to light.

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