What is recorded here

Stone number 95 in Garfinny graveyard holds two ages at once: a simple lightly cut cross older than the serif letters beside it, and the letters T. S. M or T & M cut later in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The cross may mark an older belief or owner, while the letters name someone the stone served when Garfinny still buried its dead without surveyors or cameras. Under that thought, the graveyard stops being a list and becomes a room where people kept returning across centuries, laying new names beside older marks and trusting the stone to remember what tongues had forgotten.

In 2010 a graveyard survey carried out by Laurence Dunne recorded the following details about cross-inscribed stone No. 95 in Garfinny graveyard (KE043-228----): 'Fourteen previously unrecorded cross-slabs or simple cross inscribed headstones were plotted and recorded in Garfinny. These crosses comprise eight small unhewn stones inscribed with crosses (59, 61, 63, 77, 95, 203, 530 and 708); five 18th / 19th century cross inscribed slabs (98, 130, 347, 449 & 712) and one late stone cross (181). Cross-slab (95), of local sandstone, 0.53m x 0.44m x0.065m, with small equal armed cross lightly incised beneath the serif letters T. S. M or T & M (Plate 31). The serif letters are late 18th / 19th century in date. However, the cross is more lightly and more simply executed and appears to be earlier' (Dunne 2010, 16). See attached photograph courtesy of Laurence Dunne Compiled by: Caimin O'Brien Date of upload: 29 June 2022

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