Mayo memories: death customs and burials in old cemetery

PART 1

By Tom Gillespie

SIXTEEN years ago a very interesting article appeared in the 2008 Castlebar Parish Magazine featuring the old cemetery in the county town and burial customs of olden days.

The cemetery on the Westport Road in Castlebar used to be called the Old Church Cemetery as the original burial place was the site of an early church.

When Castlebar Urban Council (UDC) decided to extend the burial ground in the early 1900s the place, by all accounts, was in a bad state.

There were no secure boundary fences, which allowed cattle and other animals to wander all over the area, which was almost completely overgrown. There appeared to be no regulations regarding the issuing of burial plots.

Having eventually established its authority over the cemetery, the council, having exhausted all other means of securing the necessary finance to carry out improvements, set about raising a government loan.

The state of the cemetery had been the topic of conversation with the general public and the subject of much debate at council meetings over a number of years.

When the land for the first extension was eventually acquired from Lord Lucan, Mrs. Kilkelly, Mr. Michael Quinn and Mr. Edward Read, and the council, set about bringing some order to the way it was used and maintained.

New fencing was to be erected right around and walkways put in place. All the plots in the new extension were marked out by an engineer and all the new graves had to be paid for.

A contractor, Mr. Higgins from Liscromwell, was employed to carry out the work.

The burial ground was extended on both the Westport side and the town side of the original site in 1910 as well as towards the old gaol, with the section involving the second extension on the town side being opened in the late ’40s to make the cemetery as we know it today.

Councillor Dan Hogan had fought a long campaign to have the cemetery properly fenced and tidied up to show some respect for the dead buried there.

As there was a very high bank on the Westport Road side of the cemetery it was found necessary to install steps to alleviate the problem of bringing coffins to graves in that area.

At the time it was stated that there was not enough money to finish this part of the work and that some of the councillors themselves could have financed the completion of the steps.

There was great animosity between the Urban Council and the Castlebar District (Rural) Council about fencing the project, even though there were people from rural parts of the town buried in the cemetery.

Burials took place in the new extension before the ground had even been marked out or consecrated, much to the annoyance of the Urban Council members.

From reports of council meetings at the time it appears that quite a number of patients from the Mental Hospital were buried in the old cemetery prior to the hospital acquiring its own burial ground, which was located at the back of St. Mary’s Hospital close to the N5. There is a memorial erected in the old cemetery and also on the N5 in memory of all those deceased people.

There are also a number of Protestants buried in the old cemetery as the Church of Ireland churchyard cemetery was full and the new cemetery, next to the Travellers Friend Hotel, was not opened until circa 1870.

Among them were Frederick Cavendish, founder of The Connaught Telegraph, members of the Bingham family and other distinguished families.

Up to more recent times the majority of people died in their own homes. When a person died, after a respectful period of time the body was washed by the woman of the house or by neighbours.

It was laid out - sometimes in a habit - blue for a woman, brown for a man.

This was called ‘putting the corpse overboard’, a term probably referring back to the time when in many houses, especially country houses, the laid out corpse was placed on a flat board, such as a door, and then generally placed on a table in the kitchen.

Older generations could recall the different customs at wakes. The clay pipes and snuff and a drop of the ‘craytur’ were as synonymous with wakes as was the storytelling and the ‘caoineadh’ women.

Wakes were an important part of mourning. Neighbours and friends would gather to support the bereaved and also to pray for the deceased.

There was a lot of poverty in the olden days and people had not the money to employ a hearse and many of the coffins were of poor quality and were described as ‘workhouse coffins’. A horse cart was often used instead of a hearse in rural areas.

In many cases the coffin was carried on the shoulders by men from the locality.

In the early 1900s remains were not taken to church but taken directly from the deceased’s home to the cemetery. Later came the house-drawn hearse.

NEXT WEEK: Clocks were stopped when a person died in the household.