Gan Comhartha Lena Chomóradh
Eimear Arthur | Tolka Issue Eight, September 2025
Off the northwest coast of Ireland, between the white sands of Trá Bhán and the Atlantic’s roiling waves, there is a rocky islet, approximately 150 metres long and 100 metres wide, marked on Google Maps as Illanamarve. The islet transforms depending on point of observation: from certain parts of the surrounding landscape, it presents as one of the many promontories edging the shore, from other angles, it’s clearly a place distinct. Though visible from most nearby towns, such as Annagry and Carrickfinn, at closer range Illanamarve is intermittently blocked from view by rising topography. Just as you catch sight of it, you lose it again. Composed almost entirely of granite, the island has a shallow covering of soil and grass but is devoid of trees or shrubbery. The route from Trá Bhán to the island – passable only at low tide – changes quickly underfoot from sand to loose rocks and stones, becoming a steep, grassy path at the point of ascent. In The Sacred and The Profane, his exploration of myth, symbol and ritual in the secular world, historian Mircea Eliade declares that a church ‘shares in a different space from the street in which it stands’. Visiting Illanamarve on a still winter’s day in 2012 with a local man, Seamus Peter Boyle, the sun low and distant, the tide calmly withdrawing, there was a sense of crossing into a different sort of place, a place due some reverence.
I’ve often wondered since if I would have intuited that difference had I no prior knowledge of the island.
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In the second act of Brian Friel’s Translations, there is a scene in which we see for ourselves the endeavour driving the play: Owen, a Donegal man, assists Lieutenant Yolland, a British soldier, in anglicising local place names – Bun na hAbhann, Carraig na Rí, Poll na gCaorach – either by creating a misshapen echo of the sound in English, or by directly translating the original phrase. Should Druim Dubh become Dromduff or Black Ridge? The soldiers are participating in a project to map all of Ireland – ‘at the scale of six inches to the English mile’ – to aid the British government’s taxation and military strategy. Owen has, in the play’s previous act, professed indifference to his task, and he’s begun answering to the name Roland, because it sounds kind of like Owen, which the visiting soldiers can’t, or won’t, pronounce. ‘What the hell,’ he says. ‘It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t it?’
Soon, though, he loses his temper, telling Yolland his real name and asking, ‘Do I look like a Roland?’ The outburst comes following Yolland’s insistence on recording a crossroads as Tobair Vree, the toponymy of which Owen has explained is an ‘erosion’ of Tobair Bhriain (Brian’s Well), so named for a man called Brian who drowned 150 years ago in a well at that site. Owen says that he only knows the story because it was passed to him by his grandfather, and questions the logic of preserving a placename to ‘maintain piety with a man long dead, long forgotten, his name eroded beyond recognition, whose trivial little story nobody in the parish remembers’.
Yolland points out that he, Owen, remembers.
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Google Maps launched in the US in 2005, rolling out to Britain and Ireland months later. It’s hard to imagine now that almost all our journeys are mapped by phone, but in 2009, when cars loaded with cameras began capturing Ireland for Google Street View, there was some public resistance to the process, some concern about the privacy implications. This scepticism was validated by the revelation that Street View cars were intercepting the private WiFi data – including medical records, passwords and email content – of the homes they surveyed. In 2013, in settling a case brought by thirty-eight US states, Google conceded that it had violated people’s privacy.
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‘Illanamarve’ is an echo, a sound meaning nothing on its own. When I search Google Maps for the island’s Irish name, ‘Oileán na Marbh’, the mapping platform becomes confused, sending me instead to Oileán Máistir (Illanmaster, or, in direct translation, Master Island), an island north of County Mayo inhabited by puffins and storm petrels. These phonetic anglicisations sound similar. Had Google’s real-life Owen and Yolland chosen to directly translate the Donegal island’s name, the result would have been more informative: Oileán na Marbh, in English, is ‘Isle of the Dead’.
This island of the dead is one of at least 1,444 cillíní (or separate burial grounds) throughout Ireland. Cillíní were used primarily for the remains of stillborn and unbaptised infants, though they also received shipwrecked sailors, people with intellectual disabilities, and those who had died by suicide: groups considered ‘other’ by the local Catholic community and therefore unwelcome in the church graveyard. In the mid-nineteenth century, many cillíní were repurposed to accommodate casualties of the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, or ‘the great hunger’), which caused the deaths of approximately one million people through starvation and associated diseases.
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In May last year, I was in St Fintan’s Cemetery in Dublin. My older brother, home from Denmark, had nervously driven us there, on what he now considers the ‘wrong’ side of the road. My younger brother was in the back with his girlfriend, my parents, in the mourning cortege. The day was bright and warm; I regretted the navy wool dress I’d worn. The week before, my beloved maternal grandmother and last surviving grandparent – christened Anne, but known as Alvina – had died in her sleep. Losing Gran, though inevitable, stung us all: she had managed to make everyone feel her favourite. (Remember: her hands, sure and thin-skinned, guiding mine round her prized Singer sewing machine, in a fruitless attempt to pass on her skill.) It remains unfathomable that I’ll never again feel the incredible softness of her hands; hands that had no business being so soft after a lifetime’s utility. But Alvina had recently been saying she was ready to be reunited with Billy – the husband of sixty-three years who had, in 2019, predeceased her – in heaven.
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Though there is some evidence for the separate burial of children in pre-Christian Ireland, archaeology shows a huge increase within the by-then predominantly Christian country from the seventeeth century onward, probably due to an enhanced emphasis on notions of limbo and original sin during the Counter-Reformation. The theory of original sin holds that the person as born is fundamentally tainted and may only be sanctified through baptism. The limbo of infants – a concept now contested by many Catholic hierarchy – is the afterlife condition for those not cleansed of original sin, nor damned to hell by their own actions: an in-between. The 1566 Roman Catechism taught that ‘infants, unless baptised, cannot enter heaven’ and the Church prohibited the burying of unbaptised children in consecrated ground. The practice of separate infant burial grew by necessity.
Cillín graves were usually unmarked, or marked simply with a rough, anonymous piece of stone (there is evidence that white quartz was often used for this purpose, having sacred associations). Many cillín sites were abandoned between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though some were active until the 1960s. It’s believed Oileán na Marbh is home to the remains of more than five-hundred stillborn and unbaptised children.
Oileán na Marbh – a descriptive evolution of the islet’s original name, ‘Oileán na Mara,’ or ‘Island of the Sea’ – is drawn, but unnamed, on the 1838–42 six-inch Ordnance Survey Map; the map Friel’s Owen would have been assisting the Lieutenant in preparing. The site remains unlabelled until the 1906 twenty-five-inch Map, where the ‘Illanamarve’ form appears. The twenty-five-inch Map generally used a shorthand, CBG (Children’s Burial Ground) to denote cilliní, but that designation is absent here. Instead, the note says ‘Old Burial Ground (disused)’ though local people say the cillín was active until 1912. Despite inconsistent and incomplete records, the island’s history and its name endured in the local collective memory: Seamus Peter Boyle told the Irish Times in 2011 that, ‘We have all watched the mothers and fathers on the beaches and pier over the years, some going to the island alone, and we knew, but it was never really spoken about’.
The evidence around separate infant burial in Ireland’s pre-Christian era suggests it was part of a holistic mortuary ritual. Nyree Finlay’s archaeological study of the Neolithic site at Fourknocks found that most adults were cremated and their ashes buried in the main chamber, while most infant remains were buried, without cremation, in the passageway – a liminal zone between the chamber and the outside world.
Similar patterns of cremation and inhumation emerge in analysis of remains found at the Mound of the Hostages (Dumha na nGiall, in Irish), at Tara, which was in use as a tomb for roughly 1,500 years from approximately 3,000 BC. Of twenty-three individuals whose ages can be obtained, seventeen adults and one child were cremated; one adult and four children were buried. It’s likely these practices were tied to some pagan belief around children’s passage to the afterlife. At Samhain and Imbolc – Gaelic festivals heralding winter and spring, respectively – the passage at the Mound of Hostages is illuminated by the rising sun. Ancient burial mounds were considered portals to the otherworld, and Samhain the time when the boundary between worlds was most permeable.
So, the Christian Church did not invent separate infant burial. But, via the concept of original sin, it suffused the practice with fear and shame, and possibly subverted the original motivations. Rosanne Cecil, in her 1996 book The Anthropology of Pregnancy Loss, quotes a Northern Irish woman as saying, ‘definitely nobody ever said, “we are sorry you lost the baby”. No, it just wasn’t mentioned.’ The loss of a stillborn or infant child was rarely publicly mourned. Compounding their grief, Catholic parents suffered guilt and sorrow, believing their lost child to be excluded from heaven, with no prospect of celestial reunion.
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St Fintan’s Cemetery is in Sutton, on the southwest side of Howth Head, a peninsula in northeast Dublin. A peninsula is a piece of land surrounded on almost all sides by water: not quite, but almost, an island. Some historians believe Howth Head is the island that appears on a second century map by Claudius Ptolemy as Edrou Heremos, ‘Edar’s isolated place’. Sutton itself is the tombolo – an accretion of sand and gravel – that ties Howth Head’s erstwhile island form to the mainland.
The cemetery and its parish are named for St Fintan, though the specific Fintan in question has not been determined. ‘Sutton’ is of English toponymy, from the Anglo-Saxon for ‘southern farm’, but the area’s Irish name is ‘Cill Fhionntain’, meaning ‘Fintan’s cell’, or ‘Fintan’s church’. (‘Howth’ is of Scandinavian origin, the Irish name being ‘Binn Éadair’, meaning Édar’s peak, or hill, first plundered by the Vikings around 819 AD.)
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Giambattista Vico, the Italian philosopher, historian and rhetorician, considered the burial of the dead to be one of three universal institutions of humanity, along with religion and matrimony. A gravesite honours the person interred there and provides those left behind with a focal point for their grief, allowing for what philosopher and architectural theorist Karsten Harries calls ‘commemorative meditation’: the active remembrance of the dead. In The Dominion of the Dead, writer Robert Pogue Harrison argues that, by its very definition, a grave must be marked, noting that the Greek word for grave – ‘sema’ – is the same as that for sign, and that the origin of the statue is as grave marker. Discussing the importance of honouring the dead in burial, he is categorical: ‘it does not suffice to bury the dead … it is necessary to mark that burial’.
Unmarked graves are often associated with colonialism, genocide, war and racial conflict. When US forces liberated the Ohrdruf camp at Buchenwald in 1945, they found hundreds of bodies ‘piled like wood’, some partially incinerated, in sheds and pits. Radar anomalies suggest the unmarked burial of hundreds of First Nations children near former residential schools and hospitals in Canada. In late 2023, drone images circulated of an estimated eighty unidentified Palestinian bodies in a mass grave in Rafah. Archaeologists believe that during the slave trade, up to 20,000 dead Africans were unceremoniously dumped, without tombs or markers, at the ‘cemetery of the new blacks’, a harbourside site in Rio de Janeiro. Death does not bring an end to subjugation, as the dead are denied either the funereal rites of their culture or of the people burying them.
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A traditional Christian gravesite is marked in two ways: individually, with a headstone or cross, and collectively, by the consecrated, boundaried domain in which it lies. Mourners may visit an individual grave, leaving flowers or mementoes reflecting their personal relationship with the deceased. In this way, the site becomes a repository of memory, one that accretes and changes over time.
The individual name holds special power even within a collective monument: consider the weight of names inscribed at Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial – the ‘black gash of shame’ – or the 2,983 names on the bronze parapets surrounding the Twin Towers memorial pools in New York. An abstract figure of 59,000 war dead, or 2,983 murdered by terrorists – or 500 dead babies – while horrifying, does not have the conceptual clarity, the visceral solemnity, of seeing each name, the evidence of each individual person, with one’s own eyes.
Within a graveyard, the significance of the individual marker is inflected by its proximity to many other graves, which together create a communal sema, a site of collective commemorative meditation. Harries says the graveyard gives us a ‘sense of belonging in an ongoing community’. Here is the physical evidence that others have lost as we have lost, that they have suffered as we have suffered, that death is an enduring and inescapable part of life.
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There were lots of us at Gran’s funeral. There are, generally, lots of us: my mother was one child of ten, and I’m forever losing count of my cousins. Friends attending the ceremony remarked on the strangeness of seeing us all together, iterations of each other, slight variations on a theme. My cousin Gráinne most closely resembles my grandmother: as if a great painter had rendered the young Alvina's face from memory. (Alvina was a great painter, back when she could see.) Watching them lower Gran into her spot alongside her mother and her husband, we gripped each other: parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends, as we’d gripped each other in this graveyard many times before. The adjacent schoolyard was alive with the laughter of children. After Gran’s burial, we visited other important graves: an aunt and an uncle who died far too young, my cousins’ other grandparents, another cousin’s brave, beautiful toddler who made fun wherever she could in her short and challenging life. St Fintan’s cemetery walls circumscribe a site of grief and loss; of sometimes profound, tragic unfairness; and of community.
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Cillín graves usually lacked an individual headstone or cross, and if there was a marker, it would very rarely have been inscribed. The ‘othering’ of the people buried in these places, likely combined with the cost of individuated markers, deprived mourners of the type of sema we might recognise. However, those burying a loved one in a cillín were not immune to the desire for individuation in mourning. Kathleen Hannon, from nearby Annagry, told me that when her great-grandfather buried his daughter (Mrs Hannon’s great-aunt) on Oileán na Marbh, he did so near a large rock, so that the rock would mark her grave. This practice was not uncommon, according to Mr Boyle, who said that, though there were no official grave markers, a father (for it was usually a father who went under cover of darkness to bury his child, the mother confined at home with her grief, ‘unclean’ until she was ‘churched’) would often leave a personal sema: ‘a father … might put two stones or three stones on top of it, you know, and that was his. Nobody else knew whose it was or anything like that’.
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My father’s siblings attended my maternal grandmother’s funeral on the ninth anniversary of their own mother’s death. After Sutton, but before the repast in Clontarf Castle, they made a pilgrimage to their mam’s gravesite in Kinsealy where Sally – not her baptismal name – is buried with Jim, my grandfather, to pay their respects. (Clontarf comes from the Irish ‘Chluain Tarbh’, meaning ‘pasture of the bulls’, and Kinsealy, from ‘Cionn Sáile’, meaning ‘head’ or ‘headland’.) When Sally died in 2014, a mourning procession accompanied the coffin on its journey past her house and into the Church of Our Lady of Mercy. I was living in New York at the time and missed the funeral – to this day, my greatest regret – but I’m told the church was packed. (We’re in her kitchen, making jam from berries we picked. She’s cajoling me – am I five? Six? – to try cucumber. She’s overjoyed to discover I like it, is triumphant later, relaying this news to my mother.)
When Jim – a talented civil servant, hurler, hurley-maker, and Gaeilgeoir – died in 2020, a Covid-19 lockdown meant just twenty-five of us could attend his funeral. Friends and family stood in the church carpark to pay their respects, alongside representatives from Craobh Chiarán, the GAA club Grandfather helped found. The number gathered was a fraction of what it might otherwise have been. My brother in Denmark watched the live stream from a meeting room at work. He once told me it’s the loneliest he’s ever felt.
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The architect and theorist Adolf Loos wrote, ‘When we find in the forest a mound, six feet long and three feet wide, raised by a shovel to form a pyramid, we turn serious and something in us says: here someone lies buried.’ Rows of inscribed stones or wooden crosses, or successive niches in a columbarium, are cues for us to ‘turn serious’, even if we don’t have a personal connection to anyone commemorated by these specific markers. A Christian graveyard is usually delimited by a wall, marking both inclusion and exclusion, the boundary between the sacred and the profane.
Located outside the consecrated church graveyards, cillíní were isolated from the ongoing community inhabiting those Christian sites. Finlay asserts that the cillín site is an archaeological expression of the infant ‘on the periphery of . . . normal lifecycle events’. Cillíní were often in liminal spaces: at crossroads, riverbanks, a patch of unconsecrated ground at the edge of a graveyard. There was no consistency in shape, size or orientation to offer clues that here existed a cillín, that it was time to ‘turn serious’.
However, many cillíní were within former ecclesiastical sites, beside ringforts, at holy wells, and near megaliths: as in much of Irish culture, there is a blurring of Christian and folk traditions. This practice seems to represent an effort by the bereaved to confer some sanctity – a seriousness – on the resting place of their loved ones, in the face of exclusion from the churchyard. On a practical level, these historic sites were marked and known within the landscape and bestowed a kind of physical protection because they were unlikely to be demolished, built over or farmed. There was also the folkloric belief that ancient monuments were points of communication between this life and the next: perhaps interring a loved one at one of earth’s thresholds might aid their crossing over? This kind of precaution is not unique to Ireland. There’s evidence that some Wyandot and nineteenth-century West African cultures did not bury infants in cemeteries, instead leaving them at roadsides in the hope that their souls may find rebirth via the body of a passing woman.
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Irrespective of the presence or absence of physical semae, the location of a cillín is often indicated by a place name including the words cillín/killeen, calluragh or ceallúnach. These place names were embedded in the oral tradition of a region, with a proportion recorded on maps and formalised over time. ‘Cillín’ directly translated is ‘little church’, perhaps having an etymological root in the Latin ‘cella’, meaning small church or oratory, which may be linked to the frequent location of cillíní in formerly religious sites and reused monuments. Cillíní inhabiting reclaimed ringforts are identifiable by the name lisín or lisheen. In all of these cases, the place name acts as a sema, expressing the burial function of the site, and ‘maintaining piety’ with people long dead.
In Tuam, in the west of Ireland, an investigation sparked by local historian Catherine Corless found that the bodies of 796 infants and children had been disposed of in a septic tank in the grounds of St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home. These state-sanctioned ‘homes’ were institutions for unmarried mothers and their children, run by religious orders who required unpaid work from the interred women in return for a year’s bed and board. After that year, the mother left – some to further internment in Magdalene Laundries – with the child staying on until they were adopted, fostered or old enough to be sent to an industrial boarding school.
Tuam, from the Irish ‘tuaim’, is of the same derivation as the Latin ‘tumulus’, meaning burial mound. This ancient name predates the establishment of the home. The Bon Secours nuns who ran St Mary’s, and – via PR consultant Terry Prone’s now-notorious email – denied all knowledge of the septic tank grave site, cannot be credited with any effort to bestow the dead children with respect in burial.
Local people have, in recent years, erected a sema at the site, the number ‘796’, in tall white figures.
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The name of that islet west of Carrickfinn, Oileán na Marbh, is particularly stark and evocative, as is its physical presence in the landscape. Though neither former church graveyard, nor ancient dolmen, the form and location of Oileán na Marbh – between shore and sea, belonging completely to neither, a territory changing with the tides – give it a distinctive status. Denied inclusion in consecrated ground, the infants buried on the island are, perhaps, honoured, through the land itself, with a more primordial form of sanctity.
Island burial sites abound in history and art. Arnold Bocklin’s 1880s painting series, Isle of the Dead, depicts the boat journey to bury a corpse on a desolate islet. Bocklin was apparently inspired by the cemetery island of San Michele in Venice, still in use today and recently extended to a design by David Chipperfield Architects. An Indigenous American mass burial site at Buzzard Island, Crystal River, Florida, is thought to have been in use for over 2,000 years, beginning in pre-Christian times. At high tide much of Buzzard Island is submerged, and so the burials are confined to a small central area about forty-six metres in diameter. In Tina, on the Philippine island of Panay, a traditional burial ground is divided from the settlement by two rivers.
The breadth of cultures across which the island cemetery features suggests an intrinsic human inclination towards island burial sites. Perhaps separation from the mainland was considered hygienic, or reduced the chances that remains would be disturbed. Maybe the island’s inherent exposure to nature was an attraction. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that when nature reveals itself to us ‘in turbulent and tempestuous motion; semi-darkness through threatening black thunder clouds; overhanging cliffs shutting out the view by their interlacing; rushing, foaming, masses of water’, we are confronted with the fragility of our own lives. Oileán na Marbh, exposed to the ungovernable Atlantic Ocean, reminds us of our own vulnerability. The island itself becomes a sema, a marker of mortality.
There are widespread references in history, literature and mythology to water crossings as passage to the next life. Ancient Egyptians believed it necessary to traverse a river by boat to meet Osiris, the god of resurrection, the dead, and the afterlife. The sixth book of the Aeneid describes a journey across the River Styx into the Underworld, guided by Charon. According to Zoroastrian mythology, all souls must cross the perilous Chinvat Bridge after death. Oileán na Marbh’s separation from the mainland informed a distinct ritual around burial on the island: crossing on foot, at night, when the tide allowed. This sort of ritual, in its own small way, replaced the local Catholic funerary rites – such as the wake – that the deceased infant was denied.
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Every loss teaches some sad lesson. A friend of mine died when we were teens and I learned about mortality, that you don’t always get another chance to tell someone how much you appreciate them. Another chance to dance with them in a seaside carpark on a fuggy summer’s night. When my dad’s mam was sick and I was in my early twenties, I realised how little I knew about her beyond her role as my gran: that grandparental devotion can foster a one-sidedness in conversation, with grandchild in the starring role. On hospital visits I asked Sally about her childhood, how she met Grandfather, their early courting, who she was to her friends. Through a medicated haze of pain, Sally shared the story of first dancing with Jim at a fundraiser for a soldier’s widow, describing each of the supporting cast of characters in lucid detail. When she died, I learned how quickly a story can slip from your grasp if not passed on: it’s kept alive in the telling. We tell ‘trivial little stories’ to maintain piety with people who’ve passed, because they and their stories matter to us.
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Nine years after Sally died, we sat at Alvina’s funeral reception, in the room at Clontarf Castle where she and Billy had celebrated their sixtieth wedding anniversary, and we told stories about her. Woman, wife, mother, grandmother; lover of art, opera, black and white movies, Perry Como, James Patterson, and Bailey’s Irish Cream. We told her stories with the urgency of people trying to grasp a fleeting thing.
In late 2020 I did an online evening playwriting course with Fishamble, during which one of our assignments was to interview someone and use the conversation to generate a potential dramatic narrative. I interviewed Alvina. I asked about her childhood, how she met Grandad, their early courting, who she was to her friends. I’d learned my lesson nine years previously, and had been asking these stories since, but now it felt important to record them. I used the audio file to write a monologue about her life: leaving school at fourteen, finding work as a seamstress and then a clothes finisher, the tragic death of her docker brother, meeting Billy, marrying, their Irish honeymoon in a capricious borrowed car, leaving her job, having ten children and her love of making clothes for them.
I looked for the audio later, and it was gone – somehow deleted in a moment of carelessness. I felt the loss of the file even when she was still here: her soft North Dublin accent, her calling me ‘chicken’. I’d cut those intimacies from the text. (I have cut intimacies from this text, too.) But the monologue retained some map of her life, some sense of her: here was Alvina, in her words. I – not a natural performer, or even an adequate one – read the piece to my family in that room after her funeral, and together we held a piece of her.
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‘My grandmother used to talk about it,’ Kathleen Hannon told me, of how she learned about her great aunt’s grave, ‘her mother being helped to the door that night to watch them going down to the island. I was raised by my grandmother, so when we’d be out collecting seaweed or something she’d show me where the grave was.’ In the 2000s Mrs Hannon arranged for the site to be marked by a circle of stones and a white-painted cross. The large rock which had served as an anonymous sema was inscribed with the words Baby Boyle.
The previous lack of individuated semae on the island troubled the narrator of the 2006 poem ‘Oileán na Marbh’, written by Cathal Ó Searcaigh, who was born and raised nearby:
Gan comhartha lena chomóradh, gan cros lena anam,
Is mo mhallacht go gear ar an chléir a d’fhág amhlaidh é,
An maicín a d’iompair mé is atá anois curtha gan ainm.’
[Without a sign for his commemoration, nor a cross for his soul,
I curse the clergy who have left it so,
The little son I carried now buried without a name.]
O’Searcaigh’s narrator worries about the isolation of their lost child:
An cabhsa cúil a d’fhuadaigh chun na huaighe tú
[the route’s end where you were left to your loneliness]
O’Searcaigh’s poem and a 2016 song, ‘Oileán na Marbh’, by Dean Maywood represent a formalised continuation of the area’s tradition of oral storytelling.
In 2009, worried Oileán na Marbh’s history might die with the older generation, Mr Boyle and other local people organised the installation of a commemorative stone on the island. The stone bears an inscription informing visitors and future generations that this place is sacred: In memory of the stillborn babies, Famine children and sailors buried here in Oileán na Marbh (Isle of the Dead) up until the early 1900s. Erected and dedicated by the community. ‘Is e an Tiarna m’aoire’.
These physical, ritual and lyrical memorials owe a debt to storytelling, to echoes of pain and loss transferred through generations: a particular class of cultural cartography ensuring that Oileán na Marbh remains known.
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There is a passage in Adania Shibli’s incredible 2017 work, Minor Detail (translated to English in 2020 by Elisabeth Jaquette), in which the narrator describes her disorientation when trying to travel through and beyond the Israeli-controlled Area C of the West Bank, which – as a Palestinian resident of Area A – she’s had to borrow a colleague’s identity card to access. Areas A, B and C are administrative divisions set out in the 1995 Oslo II Accord, defined by differing extents of Palestinian self-government. Area C, a territory rich in agricultural and grazing land, contains numerous Israeli settlements and was, under the Accord, to have been ‘gradually transferred to Palestinian jurisdiction’, but this has not occurred.
Having not been past the Qalandiya checkpoint ‘for years’, Shibli’s narrator notes landmarks, familiar and unfamiliar, a new proliferation of speed bumps. The further she gets from the checkpoint, the greater her sense of dislocation. She seeks guidance from maps: one depicting Palestine as it was in 1948, another Israel has prepared for tourists, yet another which delineates different territories, settlements, and checkpoints, and the seven-hundred-kilometre-long wall constructed since 2002 which the Israeli Defense Forces describe as a ‘multi-layered composite obstacle’ to Palestinian attack.
The Israeli map shows numerous settlements along Highway 1. The placenames are different – where once there was Lifta, al-Jura, Dair Tarif, now, there’s Canada Park. Just two Palestinian villages remain. She compares this to the abundance of villages in 1948 Palestine: names she recognises as friends’ places of origin alongside many she’s never heard of. Not only have these sites vanished physically, but they’re absent from the mental map she’s constructed through memory and shared stories. This gulf between her recollection of Area C, its cartographic representation, and its physical form evokes in her a sense of deep estrangement. Cultural cartography can only go so far when you’re denied physical access to a landscape as it transforms.
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St Fintan’s is on a hill, the elevation meaning it’s usually windy, often cold. Proximity to the Irish Sea means screeching gulls overhead. Up the slope are the standing headstones of the historic graveyard, but in the contemporary cemetery the stones are laid flat in expanses of lawn edged by concrete kerbs.
First you pass through a pair of green gates. Then along the tarmacked route and eventually onto the grass, when you’re close – or when you think you are, it can be hard to orient yourself after the addition of new rows. Searching, you read neighbouring markers: each inscription a succinct biography, an insight into what the dead or their bereaved felt warranted recording: ‘beloved wife, mother, nana, and great grandmother’; ‘broadcaster’; ‘aged six months’. Some note the street on which the person lived. Here are candles, there, a clutch of ornaments. One stone has daffodils planted the whole way round, a spring shield.
Many say, ‘till we meet again’.
On the way, you must visit all the important graves: the aunt and uncle who died far too young, your cousins’ other grandparents.
Another cousin’s brave, beautiful toddler.
Gran’s stone is simple. Five names: her, her husband, her mother, her father and brother, with a note that the last two rest elsewhere. Dates of death and ages.
‘Much loved.’
Eimear Arthur is a writer, architect and editor based in Dublin. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from UEA and, in 2024, was selected for the Irish Writers Centre’s National Mentoring Programme. Eimear is developing a collection of short fiction and a personal history of Irish housing.
‘Gan Comhartha Lena Chomóradh’ was first published in Issue Eight of Tolka (November 2024). You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.
