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It's the new thing now: get your goats into the graveyard

August 13th, 2019 3:02 PM

By Southern Star Team

Goats can be very useful in a graveyard. (Photo: Shutterstock)

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Calling all goat herders in West Cork – the people of Crosshaven need your help to tackle an overgrown graveyard!

By BRIAN MOORE

 

CALLING all goat herders in West Cork – the people of Crosshaven need your help to tackle an overgrown graveyard!

Templebreedy Graveyard has stunning views over Cork Harbour and has headstones dating back to the 1700s. 

However, a group of local volunteers have had to admit defeat in their efforts to clean up and cut back the vegetation that has grown out of control.

‘A group of volunteers spent an entire weekend working hard in the graveyard recently and when we finally stopped, we could see we hadn’t made much of an impact,’ Cllr Audrey Buckley (FF) told The Southern Star.

‘We don’t want to bring in machinery as most of the headstones are very old and need to be preserved, but we can’t let the graveyard as it is, so we think we have come up with a very eco-friendly solution.’

While researching an answer to restoring the graveyard, Cllr Buckley discovered a community with a similar problem in the UK that had decided to let a herd of goats loose.

‘Within a very short time the goats got to work and not only cleaned up the graveyard, but revealed a number of headstones and graves that had not been seen for a very long time,’ Cllr Buckley said.

With this solution in mind, Cllr Buckley and volunteers firstly set about getting permission to deploy a herd of goats at Templebreedy.

‘We are delighted to have received permission to ‘trial’ a herd of goats to help us clear the graveyard,’ Cllr Buckley said.

‘This will be a more environmentally friendly way and a more natural approach to the task of clearing the graveyard, and so we are looking for anyone who has goats in West Cork and would like to help us out,’ she appealed.

And there is an added incentive: ‘We want to rent the goats, so they will be paid,’ promised Cllr Buckley.

If you are interested in helping the local volunteers at the Templebreedy graveyard you can contact Cllr Buckley on 086 1257512 or log onto the group’s Facebook page for more details.

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