Graveyard, Lissagriffin, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Lissagriffin, Co. Cork

At the edge of Lissagriffin, on a south-facing slope that looks down towards Barley Cove, there is a graveyard where many of the dead have no names.

Scores of low, uninscribed stones mark graves whose occupants are unrecorded, their identities absorbed into the landscape over generations. This is not unusual for rural Ireland, where the cost of a carved headstone was beyond many families, but the sheer number of these silent markers gives the place a particular weight. The site is still occasionally used for burials, meaning the ground here is simultaneously ancient and current.

The graveyard is rectangular, enclosed by a stone wall, with the ruins of a church set against the western boundary roughly halfway along the yard. Most of the grave markers cluster to the south and west of this ruined church. The earliest legible headstones date to the 1790s, and there are also several chest tombs, a form of raised box-shaped monument that was associated in Ireland with families of some local standing. In the south-east corner, heavily overgrown and difficult to make out, sits a ruined structure that may have been a watchman's hut. These small shelters were used in the early nineteenth century during the period of body-snatching, when the recently buried were at risk of being disinterred and sold to anatomists; a watchman stationed overnight could deter such activity.

The setting is quietly dramatic without demanding attention. The slope, the enclosing wall, the ruined church, and the scatter of named and unnamed stones together form a place that has been in continuous, if infrequent, use for well over two centuries. The overgrowth in the south-east corner means the possible watchman's hut requires some searching, but it repays a slow circuit of the yard's perimeter.

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Pete F
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