Graveyard, Cornaroya, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Cornaroya, Co. Mayo

A medieval parish church once stood somewhere within this graveyard in Cornaroya, but precisely where is no longer known.

No visible trace of it remains above ground, and the original boundaries of the early burial ground have been lost entirely. What survives instead is a layered accumulation of centuries: a rectangular enclosure hemmed in by residential and commercial buildings on three sides and by Church Lane to the south, with a deconsecrated Church of Ireland church, St. Mary's, occupying its northern half. Since 1993, that church has served as a public library, which means the building at the centre of this burial ground is now somewhere people go to borrow books.

St. Mary's was built in the early nineteenth century and may incorporate fabric from the earlier medieval structure, though this remains uncertain. The graveyard around it holds headstones, table tombs, and box tombs spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, along with small uninscribed stone grave markers of unknown date scattered across the ground. In the north-east quadrant stands a limestone ashlar mausoleum erected by James Cuff for Gregory Cuff Esqr. in 1811, positioned beside a close-set array of ten box tombs belonging to the Knox and Cuff families. Two eighteenth-century graveslabs, one commemorating William Smith who died in 1719 and one for Hugh Evens who died in 1718, are displayed on either side of the entrance in the north wall of the church tower; they were removed from the church interior during renovation works in the 1990s. A seventeenth-century wall monument is mounted high on the external face of the north wall towards the church's east end. The medieval presence in all of this was largely invisible until 2020, when archaeologically monitored landscaping work recovered human bone fragments near the northern limits of the graveyard. The bones were not in a grave; they had been incorporated into a layer of nineteenth-century fill, most likely disturbed from earlier medieval levels by activity in the graveyard during the 1800s. Radiocarbon dating of a fragment, the midshaft of an adult femur, returned a date range of 1450 to 1528 Cal AD, placing the individual firmly in the late medieval period.

The graveyard is accessed either by a narrow tree-lined lane from Market Street at the north-west corner, or through a gateway from Church Lane at the south-east. It is no longer used for burials.

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