Graveyard, Mallow, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
What is now a public road running along the south side of Mallow's main street was once a private avenue leading into a graveyard that most passers-by probably do not think twice about.
The site is subrectangular in shape, roughly 85 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, lined with mature trees and enclosed on most sides by stone walls, though open to the west where the current Church of Ireland parish church and hall now stand. The ground slopes noticeably downward toward the south, giving the interior an uneven, quietly disorienting quality. Clustered in the north-west corner are several chest tombs, the large box-shaped above-ground monuments that were favoured by wealthier families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and scattered across the site are architectural fragments and pieces of dressed stone whose original context has long since been lost.
The graveyard's earliest dateable headstone bears the year 1684, though the site is considerably older than that. Inside the ruined shell of the former Church of Ireland parish church, which forms the northern boundary of the graveyard, the earliest memorial is dated 1595, and an inscribed stone plaque set into the north wall carries the date 1649. Church papers from 1692 record a formal agreement to build walls around the precinct, suggesting that by the late seventeenth century there was a felt need to regularise and enclose what had likely been a more open, loosely defined space. According to earlier research, the graveyard once extended approximately 50 metres further to the north and to the east, meaning the present boundaries represent a significant contraction from its original extent. The headstones that survive in the open ground generally date from the early eighteenth to the nineteenth century, forming a relatively continuous record of the town's Anglican community across roughly two hundred years.