On a sweltering Saturday afternoon recently, I visited the St Mary's Graveyard in Donnybrook, in company with about 20 other people, all interested in finding out more about this hidden corner of Dublin.
The old graveyard, next to the Garda station in the main street, is normally kept locked, so this was a rare chance to explore the place in the company of like-minded historical enthusiasts. We had the benefit of a splendidly detailed commentary by David Neary, who retired recently as a community officer with Dublin City Council's south-east area.
Disused for many decades, the graveyard was tidied up in the 1980s with the help of a community employment scheme and the good offices of a local politician, Dermot Lacey, later a Lord Mayor of Dublin. The place is now in the care of the City Council. During the course of that clean-up, the granite base for a wooden cross dating from the 8th or 9th century was found - a remnant of the ancient St Broc's convent. This is where Donnybrook began, around 1,200 years ago.
The Garda station next door was built in 1931, replacing the older Dublin Metropolitan Police barracks. When the station was built, this part of the main street was widened. A portion of the front of the graveyard was removed and some graves disturbed. Within a year, the three foremen working on the scheme had all died.
The entrance to the graveyard is through a modest ornamental archway built in the late 19th century by members of the Dublin Stock Exchange to commemorate a registrar, Thomas Chamney Seawright. Within the graveyard itself, perhaps 7,000 people were buried over the centuries.
The earliest burial records in parish registers date from 1712, but the graveyard had been in use for several centuries before that.
Many of the gravestones are no longer legible; the passing of time has worn them smooth. But many others can still be read. Some are of ordinary folk, such "Jane Wheeler, died June 9th, 1873, aged 58". No other details are given.
Another tombstone records the passing of James Tobin, grocer, late of Kevin Street, who died in 1793.
David Neary pointed out that in those days, the mortality rate for young mothers and their infants was very high. It is fitting , then, that Dr Bartholomew Mosse, who opened the Rotunda, the world's first maternity hospital, in 1745 - originally in what is now South Great George's Street - is buried here. A memorial was put up in 1995, on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Rotunda, close to his reputed burial spot.
Another grave of great historical interest is that of Richard Madden, author, historian and politician, and a benefactor of Anne Devlin, who helped in the planning of the abortive 1803 rising.
The time of the United Irishmen is also recalled in a plain grave that says simply, "Leonard McNally". He was the barrister who defended the United Irishmen, but after his death, it turned out that he also been in the pay of Dublin Castle, as an informer.
Another notable figure buried here was the architect Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, who was only 34 when he died in 1733. His great work was the Irish Parliament Building in College Green, today owned by the Bank of Ireland.
Someone else interred here who also made a great contribution to Dublin's architectural legacy in the 18th century was Bishop Robert Clayton, who was Church of Ireland bishop of Cork and Ross when he built Number 80, St Stephen's Green in 1736 as his town house.
It was acquired in 1856 by Benjamin Lee Guinness, who added Number 81. In 1939, the second Earl of Iveagh donated the mansion to the State. The government of the day made it the headquarters of the Department of External Affairs, now Foreign Affairs.
Literary connections also abound, as with the vault of the Graves family, where at least six ancestors of the poet, critic and novelist Robert Graves are buried. One of them was John Crosbie Graves, the first commissioner of police in Dublin, who was great-grandfather of the writer.
The graveyard was closed for burials in 1880, except for 45 families named in the closure order. The very last burial, of Amy Ryder, daughter of a clergyman, took place in 1936.
Recently, some cemeteries in Dublin and Belfast, including that in Donnybrook, were opened up for guided tours, as part of European Cemetery Week.
Up to the end of August, Ray Bateson, an expert on the subject, who gave part of the commentary during the Donnybrook graveyard tour, hopes to organise one cemetery tour a week in Dublin.
He can be contacted through his website, www.deadireland.com or by phone at 086-8104359.
You can borrow the key to Donnybrook graveyard from Donnybrook Garda station.
Danny Parkinson, who lives just round the corner in Donnybrook Manor, is keenly interested in local history and is the author of a comprehensive book on the graveyard, first published in 1993, which has sold more than 2,000 copies.
Once, on a visit to Rome, I went to see the graves of Keats and Shelley in the Protestant cemetery there. More properly, it's called the Cimitero Acattolica, or non-Catholic cemetery. Although currently afflicted by a financial and conservation crisis, it remains a deeply elegiac spot, full of cypress trees.
Several years before he died, Shelley wrote of this graveyard: "It is a spot so beautiful it might make one in love with death, to be buried in so sweet a place."
The same could be said of the graveyard in Donnybrook.
