Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Cork

On the north bank of the river Bride, reached by a narrow laneway, lies a small rectangular graveyard that has been absorbing the dead, and quietly forgetting some of them, for at least two and a half centuries.

Roughly fifty metres east to west and forty metres north to south, it is enclosed on three sides by a crumbling stone wall and on the fourth by a working farmyard, an arrangement that gives it an oddly domestic quality, as though burial and daily agricultural life have simply learned to coexist.

The ruins of Knockmourne parish church stand on the graveyard's northern edge, lending the site a layered quality common to Irish ecclesiastical land where successive generations have continued to use ground already made sacred by earlier communities. The legible headstones date from the 1780s onward, and a number of chest tombs, large box-shaped grave monuments that were a mark of some local status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are scattered among them. What is quietly striking, however, are the low, uninscribed grave markers concentrated towards the south and east of the enclosure. These plain stones carry no name, no date, and no epitaph; whoever placed them either could not afford a carved inscription or chose not to leave one, and the people beneath them have passed entirely out of record. The graveyard remains in occasional use, meaning the very old and the more recent lie in the same unassuming ground.

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Pete F
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