Graveyard, Hollywood Great, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
One of the more quietly arresting details in this graveyard on the southern edge of Fingal is a stone that was never finished.
Cut into its face are just five words: "This stone and burial", and then nothing. Whoever commissioned it either ran out of money, died before the carver could complete the work, or simply changed their mind. The inscription has remained incomplete for an unknown length of time, standing among headstones that tell fuller stories, a small puzzle that no record appears to have solved.
The graveyard at Hollywood Great occupies a walled, terraced plot roughly 62 metres long and 30 metres wide, cut into the base of a steep south-facing slope. It encloses the remains of a medieval parish church, the interior of which has also served as a burial space. The surrounding rubble limestone wall, finished with coping stones, holds the terrace in place against the hillside. Burials here span at least three centuries, and the headstones themselves form a loose visual history of Irish funerary carving. The earliest markers, dating to the early eighteenth century, are plain and severe, decorated with the IHS monogram, a Christogram derived from the Greek spelling of Jesus and common on Catholic memorials of that period. By the nineteenth century, the preferred motif had shifted to the Lamb of God, rendered in carved relief on many of the stones, an image of Christ as sacrificial lamb that carried both doctrinal weight and a certain folk craftsmanship. The oldest legible memorial records two members of the Flinn family: Peter Flinn, who died on 3rd May 1716 at the age of 96, and Michael Flinn, who died on 1st March 1709 aged 33. The inscription uses the archaic spelling "dyed", a small reminder of how recently English orthography was standardised.
The graveyard sits in County Dublin's Hollywood Great townland, with long views south towards the Dublin Mountains and north across the plains of the county. The slope behind it means the site is tiered rather than flat, giving it a slightly compressed, layered quality, older ground lower, newer ground higher. Visitors interested in the Fingal Historic Graves Project, which documented the site in 2008, will find its records a useful companion for reading the stones. The unfinished memorial is worth looking for specifically; it carries no name, no date, and no explanation, and is easy to overlook among its more complete neighbours.