Initially I decided not to include a sound track but that idea did not really work but I must admit that it is close to impossible to find appropriate background music for a visit to a graveyard. Anyway, I selected the music because it is what my Grand Aunt liked.
Then Mount Jerome for the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too many in the world. Ulysses, Chapter 6, Hades episode, James Joyce.
I was in the Harold’s Cross area today so I took the opportunity to visit Mount Jerome Cemetery where two of my Grandparents and a Grand Aunt are buried. I had not realised that it was the 8th of December.
Historically, for Irish Catholics, the festive period began on 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, with many putting up their decorations and Christmas trees on that day, and runs through until 6 January, or Little Christmas. Today, in modern Ireland it is the big Christmas shopping day.
Mount Jerome Cemetery & Crematorium is situated in Harold’s Cross on the south side of Dublin, Ireland. Since its foundation in 1836, it has witnessed over 300,000 burials. Originally an exclusively Protestant cemetery, Roman Catholics have also been buried there since the 1920s.
The name of the cemetery comes from an estate established there by the Reverend Stephen Jerome, who in 1639 was vicar of St. Kevin’s Parish. At that time, Harold’s Cross was part of St. Kevin’s Parish. In the latter half of the 17th century, the land passed into the ownership of the Earl of Meath, who in turn leased plots to prominent Dublin families. A house, Mount Jerome House, was constructed in one of these plots, and leased to John Keogh. In 1834, after an aborted attempt to set up a cemetery in the Phoenix Park, the General Cemetery Company of Dublin bought the Mount Jerome property, “for establishing a general cemetery in the neighbourhood of the city of Dublin”.
The Funerary Chapel in the cemetery was the first Puginian Gothic church in Dublin. It was designed by William Atkins.
The first official burial happened on the 19th of September 1836. The buried deceased were the infant twins of Matthew Pollock.
The cemetery initially started with a landmass of 26 acres and grew to a size of 48 acres in 1874.
In 1984, burial numbers were falling, thus the Cemetery was losing revenue and began to deteriorate. A crematorium was needed to regain revenue and deal with plant overgrowth on the estate. In 2000, Mount Jerome Cemetery established its own crematorium on the site.
Back in August 2021 my my first visit to this cemetery did not go well as there was very heavy rain for the duration of my visit which I had to abandon. I then had to wait for more than 90 minutes for a bus [216] back to the city centre which was really annoying as I could have walked in less than half the time. I suspect that the frequency of the service may have been reduced because of covid restrictions. I did not realise that buses run every 10 minutes between Cork and Wilton Road, stop 240571 which is close to the cemetery.
This year the weather was beautiful and I spent about an hour photographing at random. This time I only had to wait 5 minutes for the number 216 bus and when I boarding the bus the driver mentioned that the bus stopped near a very interesting old graveyard in Douglas. I took his advice.
St. Finbarr’s Cemetery in Cork, Ireland, is the city’s largest and one of the oldest cemeteries in Ireland which is still in use. Located on the Glasheen Road, it was first opened in the 1860s. The entrance gateway was erected circa 1865, and the mortuary chapel consecrated in 1867.
Many of the early burials were of the wealthy citizens of the city. Unlike older cemeteries, St. Finbarr’s was professionally laid out with numbered pathways and wide avenues.
Among those buried at St. Finbarr’s Cemetery are hurler and Taoiseach Jack Lynch; the sculptor Seamus Murphy, the antiquarian Richard Rolt Brash who was among the first to decipher writing in the ancient Ogham writing style; the English composer Arnold Bax; and Cork’s first Lord Mayor Daniel Hegarty.
St. Finbarr’s contains one of the largest burial plots of Irish Republicans who died during the 1920s. There are also more recent burials of members of the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA. This is known as the Cork Republican Plot, and among those buried there are former Lords Mayor of Cork Terence McSwiney and Tomás Mac Curtain, hunger striker Joseph Murphy. In the early hours of 17 March 1963, in protest at the unveiling later that day of a monument in the Republican Plot by President De Valera, IRA volunteers Desmond Swanton and Jeremiah Madden attempted to blow up the monument. However, during this attempt there was an explosion which killed Swanton and severely injured Madden (who lost an eye and a leg). [5] Other republicans who are buried at St. Finbarr’s, but not in the Republican Plot, include Flying Column leader Tom Barry, government minister J. J. Walsh and Dan “Sandow” O’Donovan. Commemorations of the 1916 Rising are held annually at the Republican Plot on Easter Sunday by various groups including Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, the Workers’ Party of Ireland and Republican Sinn Féin.
The “musicians’ corner” contains the graves of Aloys Fleischmann (Senior) and Aloys Fleischmann, and the composer Arnold Bax.
It also contains a mass grave containing the remains of 72 women who died at St. Vincent’s Magdalene Laundry on Peacock Lane in Cork. A family of an identified women buried in this grave have called for the site to be investigated.
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