The reference made in the ["]Diary["] on Saturday to the old Donnybrook Cemetery reminds a correspondent that of all the Dublin families who were prominent in the professional and mercantile life of the city during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, there are probably a greater number interred there than in any other graveyard used before the nineteenth century. It would seem to have been first used for burial purposes early in the seventeenth century, the earliest tombstone, still partly legible, dating from the year 1625.
For many years it and the immediate vicinity were the scenes of some eerie midnight adventures, when parties of ["]bodysnatchers["] from the Coombe and other districts, masked and armed, sallied out to procure bodies for anatomical study. Occasionally fierce duels with fists and firearms took place between the graveyard guardians and the intruders, sometimes with ill consequences for the latter. In some of the old romances of the period the accounts of these nocturnal happenings make interesting reading.
The most illustrious Irishman buried in Donnybrook is the great Dr. Bartholomew Mosse, to whom Dublin is indebted for the Rotunda Lying-in Hospital, the first institution of its kind in Europe.
The Irish Times,
October 2nd, 1928.