Graveyard, Townparks, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Townparks, Co. Cork

A graveyard that contains the earliest recorded headstone in the entire barony of Imokilly is easy to walk past on Midleton's Main Street without a second glance.

Set back from the road behind a stone wall, this L-shaped ground occupies a site with a much longer history than its surviving stonework suggests, lying on or near the location of the Cistercian abbey of Chore, a medieval foundation that gave the area some of its earliest religious significance before the later Protestant church to the south took its place in the landscape.

The collection of funerary monuments spans roughly two centuries of local commemorative practice, from a rectangular slab of 1698 carved at its base with an angelic figure blowing a trumpet above a skull and crossbones, imagery that expressed both the hope of resurrection and the plain fact of mortality, through to headstones running from the 1730s onwards. A slightly later stone from 1708 carries a cross and sacred monogram worked in false relief, a technique that creates the appearance of raised carving through incised shadows rather than actual sculpting away of the stone. Against the inside of the eastern boundary wall stand two neo-Classical mausolea from the eighteenth century, the Chinnery and Broderick tombs, with their columned or pedimented forms conveying the status of the families within. One of the more quietly odd objects in the graveyard is the sundial, which was fashioned from the top of a church spire that blew down in 1903, repurposed into something functional rather than discarded.

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