St Loman's ‘one of the best run institutional burial plots'

“A sense of a place a little bit lost but well looked after at the same time,” was how John Tierney of the Historic Graves Project described his first impressions of St Loman’s District Asylum Cemetery.

Following a two-year conservation project, John, an archaeologist engaged by the HSE, discovered the cemetery to be a “highly organised” institutional burial plot of great heritage and historical importance, and one that should be recorded in the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage (NIAH) database.

Despite the “press” and “controversy” surrounding St Loman’s, which came to national attention when a family member told the Ryan Tubridy Show how iron crosses marking and identifying individual graves had been vandalised, and subsequently “taken up” for their conservation, Mr Tierney said St Loman’s was “one of the best run”, and “one of the best preserved” institutional cemeteries of its time.

“It’s a paradoxical site,” he told a public meeting in the Mullingar Park Hotel recently.

One of the many challenges it presented was whether a family that wanted to find a relative’s grave could; and the short answer two years on, is sadly, they can not.

Photo shows John Tierney of the Historic Graves Project.

“The answer is we can’t identify the individual graves anymore. There were no copper plates found. The individual crosses are very close to where the burials are, as an archaeologist I can see where the individual graves are but I can’t identify who was buried in the individual graves.”

It is possible, however, to identify the general location of where relatives are buried and a plan is to have signs erected, including plot numbers and a mapboard, so families can find the closest area possible to their relatives’ graves.

There is a need too for a professional archivist to look after the invaluable resources presented by the patient records and letters, as well as burial register and items housed in a small store room turned museum, that includes among other things, a coffin.

“The materials you’ve gathered from St Loman’s over the last 100 years are key parts of our Irish heritage. It’s a rare resource to have,” said Mr Tierney.

Local knowledge

The Historic Graves Project, which looks at the historical development of graveyards throughout the country, used local knowledge including the experiences and memories of former staff members and family representatives.

Armed with the latest technology, including drone footage and geophysical surveys, it found a total of 1,256 individual graves, all just three feet deep.

The asylum was founded in 1855, and due to the cost of burial in adjacent cemeteries, a cemetery was set up on site in 1906. The first burial was 1907 and up until 1970, approximately 1,256 people were buried there across 12 burial plots.

Mr Tierney said every patient’s burial was officiated over by clergy, attended by patients and staff, and – as opposed to famine graves, where mass burials happened – all patients had their own graves and their own coffins. 

“The concept of Christian burial was very important in institutions, like workhouses and the district asylums, and that’s supported by the evidence we got as part of this project,” he said.

“There’s a burial register for everyone who died in St Loman’s so we know everyone that was buried in there, we have their names, but because of issues of privacy and data protection we cannot publish them.”

Two of the designated burial plots were for non-Catholics, it was found, and 48 people are buried in those.

“They stopped using the graveyard in 1970 because it was full, from then on it became an exercise in remembrance and care and conservation,” said Mr Tierney.

Issues that led to its decline were the urbanisation of the area and the peripheral location of the cemetery on the campus, which led to vandalism, wandering livestock, and resulted in an awful lot of damage. For instance, an old concrete mortuary building, later used as Church of Ireland Chapel, fell into a bad state of disrepair and was used as a “drinking den”.

In 1970, the cemetery was in good condition. “It was an exceptional heritage site, an institutional cemetery of its time, it was a stunner, it was world-class,” said Mr Tierney.

“Staff and former staff looked after it with the best will in the world, often on a voluntary basis , and did an excellent job battling against the vandalism affecting the site.”

However, of the 1,200-odd crosses marking the graves, only about 300 were left standing by the early 2010s. Those crosses were then removed.

"What we lost in those final crosses was a major change from what we had in the 1970s,” said Mr Tierney.

“What we tried to work out was could we recover the information that was lost... Will families still be able to locate the general area their relatives were buried in?” 

Photo shows the geophysical survey of the St Loman's Cemetery plot. Red dots represent the bases of the iron crosses, while the blue shows the original gravel paths. 

Understanding the site

A key part of understanding the site for the Cork city man was reading the extensive history contained in a book about St Loman’s which was published in 2014. He later discovered the living history on site.

Spitalfield is the name for the area from medieval times and means there could have originally been an old hospital on the site.

“Pretty much you can see all the graves on the ground,” said Mr Tierney, who added that the geophysical survey revealed a lot of information, with blue lines representing the gravel paths once on site, and red dots representing mental in the ground. 

“When I saw them first I thought they could be coffin plates but in the end it turns out to be the bases of the iron crosses and in some cases, they are the iron crosses themselves,” he said.

Key features

A measured survey was constructed and photographed by a drone, and imported into GIS, to plot the location of features. The key elements showed the ‘Finnegan’ grave plot, and later, a cross added at another location.

It also shows the banks and paths between individual graves.

“It became obvious we had a very well intact single-use grave plots. The norm in an Irish cemetery is that you re-use a grave plot, where family relatives go into the same plot. That didn’t happen in St Loman’s, people were buried once and that grave was left alone,” said Mr Tierney. 

A burial register shows every individual had a number for privacy, the date and person’s name, the plot they were buried in and the name of the clergymen who officiated over the burial. 

“It was a very formal system for making sure people got respectful burials, that everyone was given the same space and same treatment in the graveyard.”

One of the key features lies in plot four and is known as the Finnegan grave, named for the man Mr Tierney believes was behind the entire cemetery layout.

“The person I believe was behind the cemetery layout in St Loman’s was, I think, Dr Finnegan. I think he had such a particular mind, and he had such a particular, formal way, he wanted to be proper and tidy, and I think he was behind the 1906 system that we had in St Loman’s,” 

Admitting he was “cynical at first” when he saw the large monument that involves a kerbed grave with angel, “thinking how come the professionals got the lovely big cross but there’s actually a reason for that...” said Mr Tierney.

“Dr (Arthur) Finnegan’s wife, Eleanor, was buried 30 years before him. Her grave is surrounded by four Austrian pines, and one is “forked” for the angel to look through. He turned Eleanor’s grave due east, I think that was early landscape design by Dr Finnegan.”

At the time Eleanor, who according to local knowledge was a nurse at St Loman’s, and returned to study in Trinity College to become a doctor, died soon after and was buried there.

“Because she was staff and had been working there for a long time, he buried her there, so she was the first person buried in plot four. Arthur was buried in 1952 so he went back (to be buried) in there as well.”

Despite its greatness, the grave represents the vandalism that affected the whole site – the arms and nose are missing.
 

Mystery of the crosses

A key part of John’s work was trying to track down the pattern in the crosses. There were four main types of crosses, two wooden types, and two cast iron types.

“A lot of the crosses broke at the bases, because we found the bases still in situ under the sod. The numbers were welded to the iron crosses individually and somebody must have welded them on site. Sometimes they were back to front and skew ways, but others were perfect.

“I think they were buying blanks but I don’t know where they were getting them from, we found no receipts in the archive. But they were getting them somewhere. I’d love if somebody out there knew if there was a cast iron works in the three counties.”

Objectives

Working in archaeology since 1985, John, who has been at the helm of the Historic Graves Project since 2010 and surveys community graves throughout Ireland, suggested a number of key objectives for the care of the cemetery.

“What we want to do now as part of the conservation plan is to look after the place for the future.”

The conservation report suggests that the sacred space be “reaffirmed”, simply requiring the fortifying of the boundary walls and hedges, and the original gate to be reinstated at the north entrance to the cemetery. “It’s consecrated ground, it’s been blessed for burial, and it’s a very well run graveyard, a well run system... Reaffirm that sacred space. For a lot of people it’s their family buried inside, it needs to have a gate, and a hedge planted along its banks.”

The second key objective is to have a “simplified and clarified system” for families to trace their relatives.

“Because of the vandalism, because of the final taking down of the last few crosses, we lost that resource. A key part of the conservation plan was to discover whether we could recover some of that information. But what we do know is the location, we can get quite close to where they were buried.”

He suggests erecting plot numbers on the individual 12 plots and then having a map board of the numbers outside the gate. “The individual graves are there but we won’t be able to match names to the individually graves.”

He would also like to see the central pathways and a peripheral path, reinstated, to make the site easier to access. “If we could get some of the iron crosses back in close to where they belong, running along the paths.”

Throughout Ireland, graveyard management are looking at biodiversity, and he suggests planting a wildflower meadow at St Loman’s.

Objective number three is to have the “incredible archive” of historical documents relating to St Loman’s District Mental Hospital, and its cemetery, assessed by a professional historian and archivist for safekeeping for the future.

Mr Tierney suggested offering the archives to the National Museum of Ireland, along with conservation and storage, but it was felt among those in the room that a museum could be opened in Mullingar.