Margaret Rossiter Column: Digitally mapping St Stephen’s Cemetery, Clonmel

The extraordinary advance in modern technology was graphically brought home to this columnist in a recent report in this newspaper. Under a headline “Graves will be digitally recorded,” I read that under the auspices of Clonmel Tidy Towns (committee) St Stephen’s Cemetery will be digitally recorded under the Community Grant Scheme.

Having been, many decades ago, one of the founder members of the Tidy Towns in Clonmel, I recall that we spent many Spring and Summer nights picking up litter. It often seemed like a losing battle and the digital world was barely on a distant horizon, so now it is reassuring to read that the very active modern committee can engage in national projects, such as those in St Stephen’s, while still, no doubt, battling with litter.

Very little information on the history of St Stephen’s is easily accessible. Even in Burke’s “History of Clonmel” it gets only two sentences and it is just listed in the Olden history of the Deise People, but the site is well-known to the people who live in the western region of Clonmel who will say “it was there forever.” Not quite, but it was there since medieval times, and is presumed to be one of the early Norman foundations.

History does tell us that it accommodated people suffering from leprosy, although whether this was the biblical brand of the disease, or just an intractable skin infection, is not known. However, the settlement, which must have accommodated a number of buildings, was located quite distant from the fortified town.

Four walls of the church building survived until the last decades of the last century and then one morning a destruction crew arrived and on the instructions of Clonmel Corporation the four walls were knocked down and the stones carted away - probably for road-fill. I am open to correction, but I understand that no public notice was issued beforehand, nor had any archaeological study been carried out before demolition. Had there been, we might have learned a little more about St Stephen’s than we do know.

The entrance to St Stephen's Cemetery, Clonmel (approached from both the Western Road and Abbey Road)

St Stephen’s was, no doubt, a victim of the Dissolution, as was the Franciscan Abbey and many of the small places of worship in the vicinity of the town and now only recalled in place names - Kilgainey, Kilnamack, Kilmacomma. The site became a cemetery, sacred ground in which generations of Clonmel people were buried, including some of my own ancestors. It was a quiet place, still on the western border until the town expanded when it became absorbed by the suburbs.

ST NICHOLAS’S OLD BRIDGE
Its sister church, St Nicholas’s in the Old Bridge, is better-known, probably because it was the centre of a community. In fact the association of that community with the river and with fishing is reflected in the dedication to St Nicholas since he is the traditional Saint of Fishermen. But St Nicholas’s was traditionally known as the burial place of those who died from “the Black Death” - probably Cholera or some related diseases, of which there were frequent epidemics in the town and for which there was then no medical treatment or prevention. In folk memory, also the church grounds are associated with a burial place for victims of the Great Famine.

When the local authority - Clonmel Corporation - took on the responsibility for the provision of a municipal cemetery, in the first decade of the 20th century, these old church grounds were closed. They endured, however, as quiet, over-grown places, unlike many other sites located within, and immediately outside, the old walled town, where places of burial have been built over.
It will now be interesting to see what modern digital technology will tell us about ancient St Stephen’s.