Guarding the dead

Having re-homed Echoes of the Resurrection Men, my website all about grave-robbing, I am now trying to improve my coverage of sites in Ireland.

The photograph is an attempt to recreate the scene in the Dublin Goldenbridge Cemetery in around 1830. The graveyard  was a popular target for Irish graverobbers and the owners employed watchmen and bloodhounds to protect the newly buried.

Under the old Penal Laws, Irish Catholics could only be buried in Church of Ireland (Anglican Protestant) cemeteries, and the full graveside rites could not be performed — only prayers from the Protestant Book of Common Prayer were permitted. When Catholic emancipation came in the 1820s three acres at Goldenbridge were  purchased by the Catholic Association to create the first Catholic cemetery in Ireland since the Reformation. The first burial took place on 15 October 1828 and the mortuary chapel in the form of a Roman temple was erected in 1829.