Gothic ruins and remains: disorderly burials and respectable bodies in Irish medieval ecclesiastical buildings, 1824-1900

On 5 October 1863, the Freeman’s Journal published a statement on the desecration of burial places in Ireland by Thomas Leverton Donaldson, professor of architecture at University College London. Donaldson had undertaken a tour of several medieval Irish ruins, and called attention to their disrepair in the Builder, the popular trade publication of the architectural profession. Donaldson had found the floor of the abbey ruins, in Ross Abbey near Headford in Mayo, ‘strewed with the scattered remains of the dead’. In an altar recess, ‘where once an altar stood, and the holiest rites of the Roman Catholic Church were anciently performed’, he noted that a tomb was sunk in the earth, with its covering stones cracked and broken, exposing ‘the scene of desolation below’. He reported similar scenes at the medieval ruins of Athenry and Muckross, with ‘fragments of human skeletons lying about to be trodden underfoot’. To conclude, Donaldson demanded, ‘who has the power to remedy this state of things’, and wondered at what he had seen, as ‘certainly disrespect to the dead has never been an Irish failing’.1 Donaldson’s remarks reflect several strands of contemporary public discourse, including the value of ruins and their care and preservation, as well as the proper treatment of the remains of the dead in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. These issues were complex and multi-faceted, and were based on fears for public health and sanitation due to contamination and the spread of disease caused by decomposing bodies, as well as contemporary anxieties around growing Roman-Catholic political agency, and potential Catholic repossession of medieval sites.