Graveyard, Screhaneroe, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Screhaneroe, Co. Cork

A trapezoidal graveyard in County Cork is an unusual enough shape to prompt a question, but it is what the enclosing wall carries that makes Screhaneroe particularly singular.

Set into a gate pier is a Latin inscription recording that the wall was raised in 1783 by a Fr. Randal Hurley, a quietly personal act of commemoration built into the very boundary of the place. The graveyard, roughly 60 metres east to west and 40 metres north to south, remains in occasional use, meaning it is neither abandoned nor quite active, occupying that slightly eerie middle ground common to older Irish burial grounds.

Below and around the graveyard lies something older still. Screhaneroe was the site of the ancient parish church of Clontead, and by 1615 that building was described as being almost in ruins. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1842, the church had been reduced to a notation, marked simply as a site of something that no longer stood. Today there is no visible surface trace of the structure at all. The enclosure that Fr. Hurley walled in 1783 effectively memorialised a building that had already ceased to exist, preserving the ground of a church whose physical form had long since dissolved back into the earth.

The graveyard is reached by a short passage from the road to the south. The gate pier carrying Hurley's Latin inscription is the most tangible surviving detail from the site's layered history, and it rewards a close look.

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