Graveyard, Doneraile, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Doneraile, Co. Cork

A small, walled graveyard in Doneraile holds the quiet distinction of being almost entirely emptied of its dead.

Roughly twenty by twenty-two metres in extent, it sits on a gentle north-facing slope above the River Awbeg, enclosed on three sides by high stone walls but open to the south, where the former convent it once served once stood. The grounds are level and grass-covered now, with little visible evidence that this was once a place of burial at all, save for a large nineteenth-century mausoleum standing at its centre.

The graveyard served as the private burial ground of the Doneraile Convent, the religious community whose buildings immediately adjoined it to the south. When the convent closed around 1991, the remains interred here were carefully removed and reinterred at the Old Court graveyard nearby. That process of translocation, relatively uncommon in Irish ecclesiastical history, has left this plot in an unusual state of suspension: the enclosure survives, the mausoleum survives, but the community whose dead once occupied the ground is gone. The mausoleum itself, a substantial nineteenth-century structure of a kind typically built to house the remains of a prominent family or religious community in a single above-ground chamber, now stands in a space that has otherwise been cleared and returned to grass.

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