URBAN EXPRESSION AND DEPRESSION

Street Photography That Highlights Urban Life

Graveyard

I LIKE TO PHOTOGRAPH THIS GRAVEYARD IN MAYNOOTH

by

IT IS UNUSUAL AS IT IS WITHIN A UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

Today I brought my Sony A7RIV which I have not used for more than a year, maybe much more more. The camera is a very high resolution device as I was trying to capture the feel of the place rather than absolute detail I decided to use a Zeiss Batis 25mm lens.

If you get a guided tour on St Patrick’s College and the graveyard you may be informed that there are two unusual burials in the cemetery these being the graves of former Maynooth students who died under strange circumstances. In 1841, a student by the name of Sean O’Grady died after falling from his window in a building called Rhetoric House on the Maynooth Campus. Twenty years later, another student by the name of Thomas McGinn was housed in this same room. While in this room, McGinn cut himself with a razor, and jumped out of the same window. Before he died of his injuries it is claimed that he said that demonic occurrences in the room convinced him to end his life. Over the years I have heard many variations of the story but I have not located the graves.

SAINT JOHN’S GRAVEYARD DUBLIN ROAD KILKENNY

by

13 SEPTEMBER 2022

When I first visited this old graveyard I noted that the colour of the gravestones was different to what I normally see in Irish graveyards [orange/brown rather than grey/white]. I assume that gravestones were covered in what was an orange algae, lichen or fungi however this visited I noticed that, in many cases, the orange material had been bleached pure white

Official Description: “A picturesque graveyard forming an appealing feature in the streetscape on the road leading out of Kilkenny to the south-east. Having origins in a fourteenth-century leper hospital the grounds are of special significance as the location of a seventeenth-century Catholic chapel, thereby representing an early ecclesiastical site in the locality: furthermore it is believed that fragments survive spanning the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, thereby emphasising the archaeological importance of the site. The graveyard remains of additional importance for the associations with a number of Kilkenny’s foremost dignitaries or personalities while a collection of cut-stone markers displaying expert stone masonry identify the considerable artistic design”

%d bloggers like this: