Skibbereen Heritage Centre’s West Cork Graveyards Project has been shortlisted for an Excellence in Local Government Award – the results of which will be announced at 3.30pm on Thursday.
A tremendous amount of work has gone into The West Cork Graveyards Project by the manager of the Skibbereen Heritage Centre, Terri Kearney, and her team.
Their work, which has been nominated by Cork County Council, has earned them a place on the shortlist in the heritage and built environment category.
The aim of the project is to raise awareness and foster pride in the historic graveyards of West Cork.
They do that by encouraging people to visit them – including virtual tours – and by promoting genealogy tourism.
Terri Kearney explained, ‘We also record local, heritage knowledge that might otherwise be lost to posterity, and to share this information online.
‘We are hoping too to educate and inform on this rich aspect of our cultural heritage and focus attention on local craftsmanship.’
There are three main components to the project including the graveyard videos, the online database, and the graveyard signs.
The video tours offer a brief history of each site, some stories of those interred there, and a brief tour of the monuments too.
Meanwhile, the online database contains the results of surveys of some local graveyards and tens of thousands of records of burials from Cork County Council's own burial registers.
With the support of Cork County Council, Terri and her team have created physical signs onsite at many of the local graveyards.
The signs offer a short history of each site and a list of all those known to be interred there.
To date, the team have erected signs at Creagh, Abbeymahon, Chapel Lane, Drinagh, Caheragh Old Graveyard and Caheragh St Mary’s, and Aughadown, but more are planned.
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