An Irish Graveyard That Faces The Sea

Céad Míle Fáilte, and you are welcome to this week’s Letter from Ireland. We’re still experiencing a heatwave here in Ireland (no complaint!) and it is one of those bright summer mornings in County Cork when the whole countryside seems ripe for harvest. How are things in your part of the world this weekend?

I have a cup of Barry’s tea by my side, and I do hope you’ll join me with a cup of whatever you fancy yourself as we start into today’s letter. Being summer, I thought we would take an imaginary road trip up the west coast of Ireland – but one with a very particular focus.

Along Ireland’s Western Shore

If you’ve ever travelled along the west coast of Ireland, you’ll know that it does not go anywhere in a straight line. While the distance from the south-west of Cork to the north of Donegal may only be around 290 miles as the crow flies, if you follow the coastal roads as they twist around every bay, peninsula and headland, the route stretches to more than 1,500 miles, and with every turn of the road revealing another small wonder. Of course, much of that route has become known today as Ireland’s “Wild Atlantic Way”.

One of the wonders you encounter along the way are graveyards in the most scenic of positions. All along the western coast you come upon little burial grounds in the most beautiful and improbable places, above beaches, beside ruined churches, out on headlands with nothing beyond them but the sky, the islands and the wild Atlantic Ocean itself.

My own grandmother and grandfather were laid to rest in one of these graveyards, in a lovely spot just above the village of Schull, Co Cork and it’s no hardship to visit their resting place on any sunny day. You could sit on the wall there for an hour, looking out across Schull harbour and out to Roaringwater Bay, and almost forget what brought you in the first place.

But I remember a day I visited many years ago, when I first began to wonder why it should be here, of all places, that so many of our coastal communities chose to lay their dead, right down to the very edge of the water. It turned out that there is no single answer. Every Irish graveyard has its own story, but some of the reasons reach far back into the history of life along the western edge of Ireland.

The Holy Ones Went There First

Part of the answer begins with the saints. Some of Ireland’s early holy men and women deliberately sought out the wild edges of the land, the remote headlands, peninsulas and the islands scattered out into the Atlantic. To them, the ocean was a kind of desert, offering the same solitude that monks in foreign lands had gone looking for among sand and rock. They built small churches and places of prayer in spots that must have seemed at the very end of the world. Wherever a holy site became established, burials tended to follow, as people wanted to be laid near sacred ground. Once a few generations of a community were resting there, the place took on a pull of its own – a chain migration for the dead if you please. So, while the saint may have chosen it for the solitude, those who came after stayed because their own people were already there.

Once upon a Time, When the Sea Was the Road

There was another reason too, and a more practical one. Today we tend to think of the sea as the place where the road runs out, but for many of our coastal communities in earlier centuries it was the very opposite. The sea, lakes and rivers were the road.

Before there were bridges and surfaced roadways, travelling overland through the west of Ireland could be slow and hard going. A village only a few miles across a bay might mean a long day’s journey around mountains and bogs with the deep indents of the coast, whereas a boat could carry you there directly. In some coastal parishes the priest himself came by water to say Mass and to christen, marry and bury. For example, on Inishark island, off the Galway coast, the islanders would row across to neighbouring Inishbofin island to collect the priest and bring him home for Mass. 

So a church or graveyard beside a landing place (notice that there is often a nearby beach) was not always sitting at the edge of its community at all. As often as not, it was sitting beside its main road – the sea. We look at these places today and see only how remote they are, when the people who chose them may have seen the very opposite, not a parish divided by the sea, but one that the sea held together in a very practical manner.

The Church Moved, but the Dead Stayed

Over time, in many places, the world around the Irish graveyard changed. The old church fell into ruin, while a new one was built closer to the village or the new road. In time the boats gave way to bridges, easier land access and eventually motor cars. But the graveyard stayed where it was. By then whole generations of local families were already lying in it, and people wanted to rest beside their parents and grandparents. Buildings can be moved and roads can be rerouted, but the dead are rarely lifted and carried elsewhere, and so the burial ground stayed on at the edge of the sea, long after the reasons for first putting it there had faded from everyone’s memory.

I thought of all this the last time I sat on the wall above Schull, with my grandparents just below me and Roaringwater Bay spread beyond. It came to me that these coastal graveyards are not really about death at all. Whatever it was that first fixed them there, whether a saint’s church, a landing place, or the slow pull of generations already buried, they have become places that are worth coming back to visit. A grandchild, or a great-grandchild can come home from Canada, England, Australia or America, sit for a while with a hand on an old stone, and look out on the very same sea their ancestor once knew.

While we did not lay our dead in a beautiful location beside the Atlantic so that their descendants would one day return to them from the far side of the world, it has turned out to be one of the gifts of these places all the same. They keep the dead somewhere we still want to visit.

If you have Irish ancestors resting in one of these coastal places, I do hope you have had a chance to visit or you get to stand there one day, with the wind in your face blowing in from the Atlantic.

So, let me leave you with one question this week: Do you know where your ancestors are buried in Ireland? Are any in one of the type of Irish graveyard I have just described?

Do let me know in the comments section below.

Slán for now,

Mike.