Carved in Stone: Preserving a Community's Heritage | "Gone Underground: A Heritage Preserved"

“Carved in Stone: Preserving a Community's Heritage” is a National Heritage Week programme exploring how gravestones, memorial inscriptions and historic burial landscapes preserve the history, identity and collective memory of communities across generations. Supported by the Royal Irish Academy, presented by Ballyhoura Development and hosted by Saint George's Mitchelstown, the programme brings together local history, archaeology, genealogy and cultural heritage to reveal how communities have preserved their stories in stone, from local burial grounds to the wider Irish diaspora.

As part of Carved in Stone: Preserving a Community's Heritage, this guided exploration of Brigown Cemetery examines how burial landscapes can preserve social structure and cultural memory of a community long after they have disappeared from everyday life.

The layout of historic graves within a cemetery can often preserve the late medieval blueprint of local society. Through an examination of the 17th- and 18th-century gravestones of Brigown Cemetery, participants will explore how patterns of burial reflect Gaelic and Norman social structures that existed in the locality at the time of the Tudor conquest. By reading the landscape through its monuments and memorials, this event reveals how a community's burial practices preserved elements of its cultural heritage for centuries, offering remarkable insight into the lives, relationships and identities of those who came before us.

This event builds upon the themes explored in Irish Names in Canadian Stone: A Transatlantic Heritage, demonstrating how gravestones and burial traditions can serve as enduring records of community memory, at home and across the wider Irish diaspora.