Graveyard, Rush Demesne, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Burial Grounds
Along the coast road between Skerries and Loughshinny, a small oval graveyard sits at a slightly elevated position above the passing traffic, its walls a mixture of older stonework and concrete breeze blocks added at some point after the 1930s.
One section of the eastern ground carries the name "Stranger's Bank", a designation that suggests this corner was set aside for the unbaptised, the unidentified, or those who died far from wherever they called home. It is the kind of quiet detail that repays attention, a reminder that even modest rural graveyards organised their dead with considerable social precision.
The site measures roughly sixty metres east to west and forty metres north to south, with the ground rising gently towards the fragmentary remains of a church at the upper end. The graveyard was extended to the north-east during the 1930s, which accounts for the more utilitarian walling in that section. Among the memorials recorded by the Fingal Historic Graves Project in 2008, one stands out: the grave of John Connors of Rush, an eighteenth-century smuggler who went by the nickname "Jack the Bachelor". The north Dublin coast was well-suited to smuggling in that period, with its shallow inlets and local knowledge of tidal patterns, and men like Connors became locally celebrated figures. That he has a named memorial here, rather than an anonymous plot, suggests he was remembered with some affection rather than reproach.
The graveyard is accessible from the coast road and is worth taking slowly. The ruined church at the upper end of the site, catalogued separately in the national record, gives some sense of the older ecclesiastical context from which the burial ground grew. Grave memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are still legible in places, though weathering is ongoing. If you are specifically looking for the Connors memorial, working from the Fingal Historic Graves Project records in advance would help narrow the search. The Stranger's Bank section in the east of the site is easy enough to identify once you know to look for it, and it rewards a moment's thought about who might have ended up there, and why.