"Quaint cemeteries of the Emerald Isle"

Saint John's Cemetery

Located in the quaint village of Edgeworthstown in Ireland's midlands - county Longford - is the quaint and untouched graveyard of Saint John's. Like a chasm of virtue residing in a lake of quiet splendour, untouched and forgotten by the wider public and largely ignored by the local people, it contains the grave of Isola Wilde - the sister of Oscar Wilde - and the Edgeworth's family vault including the tomb of Maria Edgeworth - the author of the famous novel Castle Rackrent and her brother Richard Lowell Edgeworth - a surveyor and engineer of the time.

Saint John's with the Edgeworth family vault to the left; it was around there I had the strongest feeling of Oscar Wilde's sister, Isola, resting!

The Spire was a legacy of Richard Lowell Edgeworth and the method of its erection was most curious; constructed on the ground on a kind of iron sheet and then covered by slate, it was then raised by a pulley to its place of abode, and hence an example of unusual workmanship. (A curious fact about the Edgeworth family is that Abbe Edgeworth was the Abbe who attended Louis the Sixteenth of France and presided at his execution  - then later escaping!)

In the rear, the many raised vertical headstones and slabs of this quaint cemetery, with an ornate example in the front.

As above

The Edgeworth Family Vault in which are the tombs of Maria Edgeworth - contemporary of Oliver Goldsmith - and Richard Lowell Edgeworth.

Sadly, the headstone of Isola Wilde is demolished and her grave is nigh impossible to find. Her death at just the tender age of ten is most moving and the way it affected a 13 year old Oscar is a symphonic overture in itself. It's said he wrote a poem called Requiescat and that he was so moved by her death, that he took a lock of her hair, which he kept most zealously all of his life, having it with him when death visited him in Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century! Strangely, there was a very uplifting feeling as I walked around the cemetery but particularly at the Edgeworth family vault. The following poem conjured itself up from the ether:

In Saint John's cemetery
in quaintest abode of Edgeworth
I tiptoed in a suit summery  
the quaint green rolled forth
as strong wings in an aviary;

Longford county untouched
in the town the midlands border
sweet honeycomb perfumed air 
nature smoky in balanced order
choirs rustic blow breath's fanfare

With ceremonial hat I bowed
before - a courtier in his precinct
at sentiments' loving arms I cowed
as an avatar of gut instinct
to stray on paths time disallowed

Oscar's sister unremembered
took my feather's tickling fancy:
Isola but ten years numbered;
to count hidden gems is a game chancy
so I blog another place discovered!

This secluded and shut off graveyard in the pleasant demesne of Ireland's midlands seems but to be destined to be undiscovered, rendered a hidden sight in a wee village, that people merely pass through going from east to west. I had to clamber over a seven foot wall from the bonnet of the car, to gain entrance, but to honour it with one's presence is a soulful thing and also an uplifting boon in the hectic rush of travelling. Saint John's is one of those wee places off the beaten track in Ireland that seem to resound with a heartbeat of their own; they are what hidden Ireland is all about. Stop in the genial Edgeworthstown and pay your respects to, as quaint a graveyard as one could ever hope to encounter in the Emerald Isle. 

In the lap of bonnie Edgeworthstown