SOME OLD IMAGES OF ST PETERS CHURCHYARD IN DROGHEDA

PHOTOGRAPHED 20212 BY WILLIAM MURPHY

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It rained during my visit and upon becoming wet some of the flat table like gravestones became black.

This week I realised that I had not visited Drogheda since 2012 so I decided that it might be a good to get the train to the town and devote a few hours to photographing some of the local churches however I got distracted and did have the time to visit St Pete’s Church Of Ireland churchyard. However, I am planning to visit again later this month or sometime in November [2023]

Within the churchyard of St. Peter’s can be found many interesting and varied funerary monuments. Of these, perhaps the most interesting and visited is a “cadaver stone” taken from the tomb of Sir Edmond Goldyng and his wife Elizabeth Fleming. It is built into the churchyard wall, east of the present building and shows two cadavers enclosed in shrouds which have been partially opened to show the remains of the occupants of the tomb.

Helen M. Roe in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquities, 1969 estimates that a date for the tomb would seem to fall within the first quarter of the 16th century. This type of tombstone is part of a fashion widespread in Europe, although relatively rare in Ireland, which explored bodily decomposition and human mortality. This reflected a preoccupation with death arising from the great plague of 1347 to 1350, and subsequent epidemics.

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