Survey Data
Reg No
50080612
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Archaeological, Artistic, Historical, Social
Previous Name
Saint Catherine's Church of Ireland Church
Original Use
Graveyard/cemetery
In Use As
Park
Date
1540 - 1560
Coordinates
314526, 233831
Date Recorded
11/11/2013
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Graveyard, established c.1550, adjoining Saint Catherine’s Church of Ireland church. Now in use as public park. Headstones dating from eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Enclosed to east and west by snecked dressed calp limestone boundary walls, lined with red brick to interior to east, having render copings and some red brick buttresses to interior. Outer face of wall rendered to east elevation. Steel railing on render plinth wall to south elevation, matching gates to south-west. Square-profile dressed calp limestone piers.
Appraisal
Saint Catherine’s Church was built in the eighteenth century to designs by John Smyth, on the site of an earlier church that was built in the late twelfth century as a chapel of ease, part of Saint Thomas’ Abbey. This graveyard, which is marked on Rocque's Map, predates the current church. It was closed for burials in 1894 and turned into a public park in the 1980s. Many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century grave markers are simply but well executed in carved stone, and add artistic interest to the site. This graveyard attests to the long-standing religious presence in the locality, and is of part of the social history of the area.