Graveyards

The places of burial used by the settlers in seventeenth-century Ulster encompassed a variety of sites. Generally the settlers showed no aversion to using existing burial grounds attached to parish churches, subsidiary chapels or dissolved monasteries and here the overwhelming majority of people were buried. Laying claim to an identifiable burial space was one of the most important ways of laying down roots in a new country and of signifying status. While the majority of people were buried in the graveyard adjoining a church or monastery, those of status were often buried within the walls of a Church of Ireland church.

Several dozen memorials survive from the first half of the seventeenth century in the escheated counties. These range from recumbent slabs to monuments inside churches. The wording and symbolism of the surviving memorials can tell us much about the social and mental worlds of the settlers. For example, many of the memorials display mortality symbolism, that is representations of a skull and crossbones, hourglass, coffin, bell and other devices on the memorials. R. J. Hunter has explored the significance of a group of early memorials in ‘Style and form in gravestone and monumental sculpture in County Tyrone in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in H. A. Jefferies and C. Dillon (eds), Tyrone: History and Society (Dublin, 2000), pp 291-325.