Graveyard, Cork City, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On the south side of St. Paul's Church on Paul Street in Cork city, there is a roughly square plot of ground, about twenty-five metres in each direction, that now functions as a car park.
The gravestones are still there, but they have been pushed to the margins, propped against the eastern and southern walls like furniture cleared from the middle of a room. It is an arrangement that manages to be both practical and quietly unsettling.
The site is enclosed on four sides by walls of noticeably different materials: cut limestone with fine entrance piers to the south, brick to the west, and random rubble to the east, a patchwork that suggests the boundary was assembled over time rather than built to a single plan. The headstones themselves date from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the early 1970s, those that had stood along the western side were lifted and moved to the eastern edge, consolidating them out of the way of what the space was becoming. The result is that the graves and the car park now share the same ground, one use layered over another without either being fully erased.