Graveyard, Carrigrohane, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Carrigrohane, Co. Cork

In this graveyard at Carrigrohane, on the eastern side of the road just west of Cork city, there is a headstone dated 1628.

Or rather, there was. The antiquarian John Windele recorded it in 1844, describing it as the oldest grave-stone in the burial ground, but its location has since been lost, absorbed into two centuries of additional burials and ground disturbance. That disappearance is a small, quiet mystery: a seventeenth-century marker noted, quoted, and then swallowed by the very place it was meant to mark.

The graveyard itself is a rectangular enclosure, roughly 60 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, still in active use and expanded in recent times by a similarly sized extension to the south. The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the eastern and southern edges as unenclosed at that point, suggesting the boundary took its present form sometime after that survey. The same map shows a rectangular structure in the north-east corner labelled "Carrigrohane Church (in ruins)", a distinct building from the church that stood to the west. Later OS editions, from 1902 and 1939 onward, describe that western church as sitting on the site of the earlier one, implying the ruins were cleared or absorbed in the intervening decades. That north-east corner, where the ruined church once stood on slightly lower, terraced ground, is now occupied by a large Murphy family tomb and burial plot dating from the 1840s, set into what appears to be the remnant of that earlier structure's footprint. Among the surviving headstones, researchers Coleman and Noonan noted one dated 1720 during their early twentieth-century survey, and the earliest formally recorded stone still legible today carries the date 1724, making it a rare piece of early eighteenth-century funerary carving in this part of County Cork.

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