In a Word ... graveyard

It’s November! That month when we remember our dead. Not that we forget them. I find, as I get older, that I spend more time in graveyards. Parents are dying, siblings too, occasional peers. It is sobering to know this will become a more pronounced pattern as the years advance.

I now know more people in the graveyard at home in Ballaghaderreen than I do in the town itself. A cliche, of course. It happens when you work away. My mother, father, and one of my brothers are buried there, forever and ever. I will be too, but there’s no hurry.

It ought to be a sad place, and it can be, particularly when reminded of sudden or tragic deaths that brought some there, but in the main most arrived in the natural course of their lives.

Among them are some great characters and often great stories. Lots of hilarious memories too. All help blunt grief, particularly for newer visitors. It is not a place where you will find much anger, just levels of tenderness and of gratitude for lives lived of which we were part.

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Older graveyards are different. There, an emotional detachment allows for curiosity about times past. But, until last month, I did not know exploration of old graveyards could be on an organised basis.

It was then I was contacted by the wonderful Betty Carey, a senior citizen who let me know about her group which explores old graveyards. She told me of headstones where October is inscribed as “8ber” — “Oct” being the Latin for 8, as in the eighth month (though it is the 10th!).

“I record old headstones and have seen samples of date of death as 8ber yyyy [year]”, she said.

She is a member of the Baconsfield Heritage Group in Co Meath which has undertaken the transcribing, mapping and photographing of headstones in the graveyards around Enfield. They do so twice a week or thereabouts. The fruit of their work can be found at enfieldgraveyards.com

They go further afield too. For instance it was at the Ladywell graveyard on the shores of Lough Derg in Tipperary they have found 18th century gravestones inscribed with `9ber’ (November) and 7ber (September), she said.

Fascinating. So is Betty.

Graveyard, from Old English “græf”, for “grave” and Old English “geard”, for “yard/fenced enclosure”.

inaword@irishtimes.com