County Cork

ST COLUMBA’S CATHOLIC CHURCH

August 3, 2023 by infomatique

CHURCH LANE IN DOUGLAS VILLAGE CORK

There are a small number of graves of clergy within the churchyard but many visitors believe that the two cemeteries, Douglas Cemetery and St Luke’s Church Of Ireland cemetery, nearby as associated with the church but they are not. I have photographed both cemeteries.

The current Saint Columba’s is a well-maintained example of a nineteenth-century Roman Catholic church. It retains its historic form along with much of its early fabric. Quality craftsmanship is evident externally in the lattice windows and render finishes, and internally with the stained glass, fine carving and decorated apse. The decorative interior contrasts with the more simple exterior of the building. Sited adjacent to the former national school, the two form a group which has played a significant role in the local social fabric. St Columba’s was extended and refurbished in 1907 by Rev. Thomas McCullagh, who spent £1,200 on the works. These included lengthening and re-roofing the building, adding a gallery and new lead glass windows. A non-Catholic, Captain Cooper (Ballinrea House) gave generously to the Catholic parish church. A stained glass window made by Watsons of Youghal was donated in memory of John Morrogh, owner of Douglas Woollen Mills and former Nationalist MP. The church was last modernised and refurbished in 1999. The present-day interior, with its Romanesque-style decoration, dates from this time.

The first known mention of Douglas is in an inquisition on the lands of Gerald de Prendergast in 1251, and in a 1291 taxation document which records the lands as being an appurtenance of the Church of Bauvier. It is alternately listed as “Duffelglasse” and “Duglasse” in 1302 and 1306, respectively, as part of the parish of Carrigaline. In the year 1603, it became one of the liberties of Cork City. In 1615, parochial records mention the chapel of Douglas being laid waste, reportedly due to theft of the foundation stones, and in a 1700 entry of the same records it is mentioned that the ruined chapel in question had been the church of Carrigaline parish for a century prior to the construction of a new church in Carrigaline itself.[By the mid-seventeenth century, it had a population of 308 people (of whom 33 were English) and consisted of a number of large farms.

Douglas was made a separate Roman Catholic parish sometime before 1768. St Columba’s (Roman Catholic) church was built in 1814 by the Rev. Thomas Barry, according to local legend using the stones of the ruined castle of Castletreasure. A Douglas “Chapel of Ease” to the Church of Ireland parish of Carrigaline was established on 17 September 1786, with the establishment of a full separate parish in February 1875. In 1855, the Protestant population of the parish was reported as having been 310, with 150 children attending the parish school. The 1785 church was rebuilt and reconsecrated on 27 August 1875 as St Luke’s church, however, following the death of the resident Canon in 1886, as well as the principal architect, the church remained without a spire until 1889, with the church bell and tower clock donated by Mary Reeves of Tramore House, with the stipulation that the clock face towards her front door. Notable parishioners interred at St Luke’s include the poet Richard Alfred Milliken and librarian Richard Caulfield; in addition, a plaque was erected in the memory of art collector Sir Hugh Lane, deceased in the sinking of the Lusitania. The nearby parish of St Finbar’s opened a chapel of ease in Frankfield in 1838, later known as the Holy Trinity, on ground donated by Samuel Lane. An additional graveyard, located on Carr’s Hill, was opened in 1848 on land donated by the Master of the Workhouse, George Carr, to deal with the increase in deaths from the Great Famine.

In the 2011 census, the percentage of Irish nationals living in Douglas was 88.8%. UK nationals accounted for 1.7%; Polish nationals 3.2%; Lithuanians 0.6%; other EU nationals 2.1%; other nationals 2.9%; and 0.7% did not state their nationality.[

In the 2016 census, 78.6% of residents of the Douglas electoral division identified as Catholic, 8% were members of other religions, 12% had no religion and less than 1% did not state a religion. In the same census, 86.2% of electoral division residents identified as white Irish, 8.3% were other whites, 1% were black, 1.7% Asian or Asian Irish, 1.4% were of other ethnicities, and 1% did not state an ethnicity.

INTERIOR OF CHRIST THE KING CHURCH AT TURNER’S CROSS

July 31, 2023 by infomatique

LIGHTING WAS TOO LOW SO I WAS DISAPPOINTED BY THE IMAGES

VIEW CHURCH EXTERIOR

This was, more or less, my first real opportunity to us my Sony A7RIV which I purchased in September 2019 and I was still only learning how to use it.

Because of Covid-19 restrictions I was unable to gain access to churches during this visit to Cork City but this was the exception but the lighting was so low that it was close to impossible to photograph the interior with the equipment that I had. However as the best camera is the one that you have with you I did my best. I did intend to return later in the week, with a different lens and a flash, but because of weather conditions I did not get the opportunity to revisit. It should be mentioned that I do not like using flash lighting.

Christ The King Church is a Catholic church in the Turners Cross area of Cork City, Ireland. It was designed by the American architect Barry Byrne and built between 1929 and 1931. The church is a fine example of 20th-century ecclesiastical architecture, and is considered to be one of Byrne’s most important works.

The church is built in a simplified Hiberno-Romanesque style, with a long nave and a short transept. The exterior is made of limestone, and the interior is decorated with marble and mosaics. The most striking feature of the church is the large statue of Christ the King, which stands at the entrance. The statue was designed by the American sculptor John Storrs.

John Henry Bradley Storrs (June 25, 1885 – April 26, 1956), also known as John Bradley Storrs and John H. Storrs, was an American modernist sculptor best remembered for his art deco sculptures that examined the relationship between architecture and sculpture

Storrs was born in Chicago in 1885, son of architect D.W. Storrs. In 1905, he traveled to Berlin to study singing, but he soon decided to become a sculptor. He studied with Lorado Taft at the Art Institute of Chicago, with Bela Pratt at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and with Charles Grafly at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. By 1911, he was living in Paris, where he studied with Auguste Rodin and also attended the Académie Julian. He gradually moved from representational sculpture and wood engravings to the machine-like sculptures for which he is best known.

During his time in France, Storrs became friends with Jacques Lipchitz. In 1914, Storrs married the novelist and writer Marguerite Deville Chabrol and started dividing his time between France and the United States. In the 1930s, Storrs turned to abstract painting that often suggested the human figure. During World War II Storrs was twice arrested and imprisoned by the German occupation forces. After being released, he returned to his studio in Mer, France, and worked and lived there until his death in 1956.

ST FINBARR’S CEMETERY GLASHEEN ROAD

May 20, 2023 by infomatique

PHOTOGRAPHED MAY 2023

CORK CITY AND COUNTY PHOTO BLOG

Saint Finbar, Finbarr, Finnbar, or Finnbarr, in Irish Fionnbharra, very often abbreviated to Barra, (c. 550–25 September 623) was Bishop of Cork and abbot of a monastery in what is now the city of Cork, Ireland. He is patron saint of the city and of the Diocese of Cork. His feast day is 25 September.

I visit this cemetery every trip to Cork City and every time, without fail, it rains. This time I spent about 45 minutes sheltering under thrre or in the public toilet.

St.Finbarr’s municipal cemetery is located at Glasheen Road, Cork City. It is operated by Cork City Council. It opened in 1867, and houses both Roman Catholic and Protestant burials. The cemetery houses the graves of many prominent people and it is also the location of the Republican Plot which houses the remains of many of those killed in the War of Independence/Anglo-Irish War 1919-1921 and the Civil War 1922-1923, such as Tomás MacCurtain, Terence MacSwiney, and Tadhg Barry.

The digitisation of the 1867 to 1896 burial register was carried out with funding from Cork City Council and the Creative Ireland Programme, in 2017. The digitisation of the 1896 – 1930 burial registers has been carried out with funding from the Cork City Council 1920-1923 commemorative programme, and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

ST FINBARR'S CEMETERY GLASHEEN ROAD 068

EXAMPLES OF BIRD CARVINGS

May 14, 2023 by infomatique

ST LUKE’S CHURCH OF IRELAND GRAVEYARD IN DOUGLAS COUNTY CORK

Because of heavy rain I was only able to photograph the Church Of Ireland graveyard in detail.

Today some aggressive crows/rooks objected to my presence so I assume that they had nests within the graveyard – Here in Ireland “crows” is a name we tend to give all large black birds. They are highly intelligent and forage in the leaf litter between the graves for grubs. They nest in the tall pine trees in the graveyard, and are often associated with death. The other thing that caught my attention was the total lack of butterflies.

Within graveyards birds, especially in flight, represent the flight of the soul to the afterlife. Eagles are used to represent a military background but I have not seen any in Irish cemeteries. A dove symbolised the Holy Spirit and/or peace. The pelican represented sacrifice, sometimes acting as a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice, because of a medieval legend that featured a pelican piercing its own breast to feed its young.

When I first visited Douglas a few years ago I thought the graveyard occupied both sides of the road but there was a big difference and it soon was apparent that the section near the church was Church Of Ireland while the other section was Catholic.

The Church Of Ireland section featured many broken columns (rare in Catholic cemeteries) as representations of lives cut short. The Virgin Mary was confined to the Catholic section and there were many examples to be seen. Both sections were maintained but the CofI section was way more attractive.

This graveyard is an important part of the history of Cork city, with many well-known Cork figures buried here. Next to the spire is a monument to John Arnott, (1814-98) who founded Arnotts in Dublin. Businessman, philanthropist and former Lord Mayor of Cork (1859-61), he worked throughout his life to develop the industry and resources of Ireland. In the last 30 years of his life, he gave an average of £1,500 per year to public charity.

Another resident of the graveyard is Richard Caulfield, antiquarian and librarian, whose local history publications are still valued. One of the older graves belongs to the Besnards, a prominent Huguenot business family. By 1783, Julius Besnard owned the flax mills in Douglas. Besnard also helped to build the church that stood on this site from 1785 to 1874. 2 The first Rector of the new Douglas parish, Canon Samuel Hayman, (a noted antiquarian) is also buried here.

The great and the good were not the only ones to be buried here. Following the closure by Cork Corporation of graveyards within the city boundaries in 1870, city residents had to bury their dead in the suburbs. By the nineteenth century, urban graveyards were dangerously overcrowded, and ‘garden cemeteries’ began to be built outside many European cities. These burial grounds were not attached to a parish church and the graves were part of a landscaped park, with trees and pathways. In Cork, Fr Mathew had led the way, founding St Joseph’s Cemetery in the former Botanic Gardens in the 1830s. Interestingly, the planting and regular arrangement of St Luke’s graveyard is more like a garden cemetery than a parish burial ground. Its orderly layout dates from the 1870s, when the graveyard was remodelled at the same time as the new church was built.

The new church building, like the old, was built on an east-west orientation, with the chancel at the eastern end, so that the congregation could face towards the east. This was a typical orientation for a Christian sacred building. Maps from before the before the 1870s show that the graveyard once extended out from the eastern and western ends of the building. However, the bulk of the eastern end of the graveyard was divided from the church by a road, now called Churchyard Lane. In this eastern end was a watch-house, built to house a man who would guard the graves from robbers or, even worse, resurrectionists, who sold corpses to medical schools for dissection. The location of this watch house suggests that the majority of burials were in the eastern end of the cemetery. We can surmise that there were burials along the longitudinal sides also because a contemporary illustration of the eighteenth-century church shows a monument alongside it. But the construction of the new church saw a radical shift in the layout of the graveyard.

There are four World War I casualties buried here, and one from World War II. The contribution of women to the war can be seen in the Humby grave, where Private J. Humby is buried alongside Miss F. Humby, who worked for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a nursing division.

The lodge house by the gate was built for the sexton, who was employed as a caretaker to the church and gravedigger for the graveyard. The house was built for Mr Thomas Morris, who was sexton from 1879 to 1912. His terms of employment were 14 shillings a week, with residence, and 2 tons of coal.