Pureis a novel by Andrew Miller. It is set in Paris before the revolution, and concerns a young engineer employed by officials at Versailles to excavate a cemetery which is so overflowing with corpses that it taints the air, food, clothes and hair of all who live in its vicinity. Les Innocentshas become so foetid as to drive its neighbours to intimate madness. The region is shrouded in a vapour of putrefaction, and yet its people, accustomed to the stench, are reluctant to see its pits opened and its mounds of bones sterilised in funereal pyres.
Cork was never like that. Or was it? Prompted by an increase in planning applications, City Council archaeologist Ciara Brett has published a compelling survey of what lies underneath the streets, squares and hillsides of the city, listing the sites of its burials over 13 centuries, from the main city cemetery of St Finbarr’s at the western edge to St Joseph’s at the east. On the Mahon Peninsula there is St Michael’s graveyard overlooking the estuary of the Lee, and there are still some churchyards with available plots. City dwellers also often find a resting place in in the adjacent countryside as at Rathcooney and Curraghakippane, while newer interments take place at Kilcully, or St Oliver’s at Ballincollig or in the shadow of the Chetwynd Viaduct.
These county places are outside the scope of the survey, which is probably just as well. A description (from Smith's History of Cork(1774) of Kilcrea Friary near Aherla records "the twilight vaults, the caverns piled with skulls . . . high banks formed entirely of human bones and skulls cemented together with moss; and besides great numbers thrown about, there are several thousands piled up in the arches, windows etc." Kilcrea is a dramatic place, containing the tombs not only of the great Muskerry chief Cormac Laidir Mac Carthaigh (murdered 1495) but also that of Art O Laoghaire, (murdered 1773), whose railed sarcophagus records his character as "generous, handsome, brave".
In the city there may not be quite so much bloodshed to uncover, although every cemetery has its quieted revolutionaries, with St Finbarr’s on the Glasheen Road holding a large grouping of Irish Republicans, including the two martyred lord mayors, Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence Mac Swiney. Among its thronging graves it also displays the celebratory headstones carved by the late Seamus Murphy while the contemporary sculptor Ken Thompson continues the sculptural tradition of matching elegance with eloquence. A local visitor will make the family and friendly connections along these avenues: a Kearney site links to the O’Driscolls and to a marriage commemorated in a sundial carved as a wedding present by Seamus Murphy and given the memorial inscription: “it was the time of our lives”. A little further along a headstone quotes Dylan Thomas: “though lovers be lost, love is not”.
The thought that death shall have no dominion offers some consolation even as another pathway leads to the little white tablet in memory of four-year- old Juliana McCourt, who died with her Cork-born mother Ruth Clifford McCourt as the plane taking them on holiday was driven into the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001.
In her illustrated catalogue of Cork city burial places Ciara Brett offers a reminder that these are not the first graves, that in a way, as in the saying from Ecclesiastes reputedly adapted by Richard Magner of Castlemagner as a warning to Oliver Cromwell, we are live dogs walking over dead lions. At Crosses Green the 12th-century Dominican priory of St Mary’s of the Isle has been completely built over, but not before excavations produced nearly 400 burials, some interred only in shrouds and leaving nothing more than a stain on the clay as witness to their existence.
Among the dead was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, who died here in 1381; his body may still lie beneath the new apartment buildings.
At the South Chapel, formally St Finbarr’s South, renovations during the 1950s revealed the remains of six clergymen buried before 1818. The church dates from 1766, but seems to have been preceded by the Benedictine priory of St John the Evangelist. In the grounds of the Cathedral of St Fin Barre, where a monastery was established by 682 AD, and where at least 10 churches were built through the ensuing centuries, as many as 17,000 burials were recorded from 1801 to 1850, while the collapse of a retaining wall in 1992 disclosed a number of skeletons which were not subsequently disturbed and remain in situ.
Dig at your peril, might be the survey’s advice to those builders and developers whose planning applications provoked this fascinating and informative survey, raising more questions than ghosts. Do the yew trees in a garden at Montenotte indicate the site of St Brandon’s church (1462) used for burials by the nearby leper hospital? Where was the pit near the Grand Parade with its “cartloads of human remains mixed with the bones of horses”? Greenmount is adjacent to the area known as “Gallows Green”: could that have anything to do with the mass grave excavated by Stella Cherry of the Cork City Museum in 1991, with the broken bones and skulls of 15 skeletons all neatly stacked together? And where was the 1199 church of St Mary in Monte – was this the Church of the Holy Rode of 1610 obliterated by the building of Elizabeth Fort? At least St Mary’s Shandon still marks the burial place of Francis Sylvester Mahony, best known as satirist Fr Prout, friend of Thackeray, Dickens, Maclise and Browning, but remembered in Cork, if at all, for his lines on the bells of Shandon which “Sound far more grand on/The pleasant waters of the River Lee”.
Introduced by archaeologist Maurice Hurley and supported by scholarship and research, the catalogue includes Jewish, Huguenot, Baptist, Quaker, military, foundling, Magdalene and prison cemeteries, city-centre and suburban, old and new, disused, abandoned, vanished or still functioning busily. And all, unlike Les Innocents, purified.
Cork City's Burial Placesis available from Cork City Hall in synopsis or book form.