Art's Story

My visits to south Wicklow’s ‘lost  graveyards’ began after reading the online account  of  Preban’s community effort in 2009 to renovate their ‘lost graveyard’. In the process an archaeologist discovered ‘Rock Art’ with Neolithic decorations (including ‘cup marks’!).

Their website told how they set about recovering the site and listing the names on the tombstones. It sounded promising.

When I got there the grass had indeed been cut back and undergrowth tamed to reveal three centuries of Christian burials scattered over a half-acre. An information board near the gate gave a history of the site and a number for each grave.  Armed with the number for the ‘Rock Art’ I set out to find it.

However the numbers were not in order and there were no signs of ‘Rock Art’ in the forest of gravestones.  I tried to read the inscriptions on the monuments but it did not help, most were indecipherable due to moss and age.  I settled for taking photos of likely suspects.

Back at the information board I read that when the volunteers were recording burials they had come across the unique work of a group of south Wicklow artist–artisans.    

Their monuments in stone were described as ‘vernacular Baroque’, the hardness of local granite requiring bold carving and providing little scope for subtlety. However, once again I had problems locating the actual graves and took photos of the information display instead.  

The display named Denis Cullen of Monaceed as a leading member of this ‘Aughrim Headstone School’. His granite monuments can be found in many south Wicklow graveyards and can be identified by his most frequently used symbols:  the Passion of Christ, the IHS monogram, a Sacred Heart motif and the crucifixion. The crosses are usually accompanied by a hammer, ladder, pincers and spear.

I wondered where the motifs originated. They may have come from pictures he had seen in contemporary devotional books but some might be from an older tradition. Moone and Castledermot, with their decorated Celtic High Crosses, are not far away and their crucifixion scenes show similar ladders, hammers, pincers and spear.

Thinking about this afterwards, I wondered if the ‘Aughrim Headstone School’ monuments were saying something about Wicklow society of their time. The symbols and names on monuments suggested that most of the people buried there were Catholics.  Most would have been farming people, not only having to cope with poverty and insecurity but with unsettling changes in their own Church introduced by priests educated on the continent. Their traditional housed-based religious practices and attachment to local saints were giving way to parish-centred churches, statues of unfamiliar saints and a more individual spirituality.

Did the mixed-symbol tombstones created by Dennis Cullen and his companions reflect such a tension?

What is recorded on paper and computer discs may not last long but the stone-cutters’ work, whether ‘Rock Art’ or Aughrim Headstones, continue to tell stories for centuries.