Graveyard in Foher

This graveyard is very overgrown and contains the site of a church (GA010-008001-) and holy well (Tobersalrock; GA010-008003-): there are no visible remains of either monument. An interesting description of the graveyard is given by John Harris Stone in his travel guide, 'Connemara and the neighbouring spots of beauty and interest' (1906, 24-8): ‘The scene itself at first sight reminds one more than anything else of the back-yard of a country town grocer's shop, where odds and ends are deposited. A strange medley of old pieces of wood, like remains of broken-up packing-cases, sticking up here and there, an occasional intact though lid-less shallow deal box, two feet by one, half full of sawdust, and a few black bottles, apparently flung away, which have rolled into crevices between heaps of slab-like stones resembling paving-stones, but not neatly squared off as we see them in the streets. The dispelling of the resemblance is due to the thick overhanging ash-trees, whose trunks shew centenarian age, and whose interlacing branches form a protecting lace-work against the sky. The spot is really, as we have said, a God's acre, and its disguising, distressful untidiness is, we are sorry to say, very characteristic of many other old Irish burial-places. Rotten boughs from the trees have fallen all over the ground, ferns grow up here and there, and rank undergrowth of grass and bramble partially hide the evidences of mortality. Strangers, visiting the place without knowing what they were going to see, have exclaimed, in our hearing, "What does it all mean, what is it?" A very curious old custom is associated with interments here, which has made the place famous even beyond the limits of Western Ireland. A box of pipes, short clays, is brought with each corpse, and a pipe with tobacco served out to each mourner. The pipes are smoked after the earth has been filled in, and a mound of stones railed above the grave; the ashes are knocked out on the top and the pipes broken or left behind. The small boxes seen in the photograph, with remains of sawdust in them, contained pipes used at various funerals. The origin of this singular custom is unknown, but it certainly is very expressively emblematic of ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ The empty black bottles that have seen on the site seem to point to the fact that other ceremonies are also indulged in at times by the mourners. The corpse, too, is borne three times round the cemetery, and only close relations carry it, preferably those of the same surname. The odd pieces of planking seen in the photograph sticking up here and there are placed at the head and foot of the graves. There are also a few simple wooden crosses, but only one or two graves bear any inscriptions. There is also a holy well in the cemetery, now filled up with rubbish; and two ash-trees growing in very close proximity to one another over two graves, which tradition asserts are the final resting-places of two lovers never united in life, but who departed on the nine day, so that in death they were not divided. The superstitious see in the two trees, grown so close together, a similitude to the lives of those whose graves they cover.’ GA010-008002-_01.jpg Plate from 'Connemara and the neighbouring spots of beauty and interest' (1906, 29).