Graveyard, Townplots, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Townplots, Co. Cork

The graveyard surrounding St. Multose church in Townplots, Co. Cork, contains a cluster of structures known as "dog-kennel" mausoleums, a term that conjures something stranger than it delivers, though the reality is odd enough.

These small, low-roofed burial enclosures, shaped roughly like kennels and built to house the remains of local families above ground, sit alongside a larger early eighteenth-century mausoleum complete with a cornice, cemented walls, and a slated roof. The oval plot, roughly 80 metres east to west and 60 metres north to south, is enclosed by a high stone wall that, according to the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, had not yet been built at that date. The wall, then, is a relatively recent imposition on a space that has been in use for considerably longer.

The oldest datable stonework here predates the enclosure wall by centuries. A grave slab on the Webb vault near the southern wall carries a date of 1582, and an altar tomb set against the same wall is inscribed 1670. The entrance gates, described by Garner in 1980 as particularly handsome, are framed by late eighteenth-century piers of channelled ashlar, a style of stonecutting in which parallel grooves are cut into the face of dressed stone blocks to give a formal, decorative finish. Numerous other vaults, chest tombs, and uninscribed headstones fill the remaining ground, many of them without dates or names now legible. The site remains in occasional use as a burial ground.

The wrought-iron gates and their ashlar piers are among the more immediately striking details for a visitor approaching the church. The varied funerary architecture within, ranging from the plain and anonymous headstones to the dog-kennel structures and the substantial early Georgian mausoleum, gives the enclosure an unusually layered quality, several distinct periods of burial practice occupying the same modest oval of ground.

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