Graveyard, Churchtown, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Inside this graveyard in Churchtown village, the ruin of Bruhenny parish church sits at the centre rather than the edge, so the dead surround it on all sides.
The interior of the roofless shell is dense with flat slabs, table tombs, and vaults, all dating to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, giving the impression of a room that has slowly filled up with stone furniture and then been abandoned to the weather.
The surrounding enclosure is roughly rectangular, measuring approximately 48 metres from west-southwest to east-northeast and 40 metres across, its boundary formed by high coped walls, meaning walls finished with a protective ridge of stone along the top, which were rebuilt in 1898. The earliest legible headstone in the graveyard dates to 1737, and most of the others belong to the same century. A wrought iron gate at the southern end of the western wall provides the main entrance. The churchyard remains in occasional use, though the ground within and immediately to the east of the church ruin has been left to grow over, giving that part of the site a different texture from the clipped grass elsewhere.