IRELAND: Graveyard Prowling

There was a time when just walking past a graveyard would send shivers down my back. 

But now that I am older I find graveyards are interesting. 

They don't generally reveal much, just when someone was born and when they died. But if you stop to look more closely there are more clues. Sometimes who their parents were, who they married, siblings, kids, where they lived and what they did. There can also be clues with icons on their gravestones that reveal more. 

I always wonder what the rest of their lives were like because at most a graveyard just reveals a small snapshot of a person's life, not all their joys and sorrows or trials and tribulations. 

Anyway, enough musing... a friend knew we were in Ireland and part of her family had come from Ireland, back in the day.

She asked us if we would be near a tiny village called Kildysart.

Well, that simple question led to a "mission"!

My sister Marie stumbled into the village's pretty graveyard at the edge of the town. 

She is much braver than I am and she wandered in by herself and started to search for the single name we had - Murtagh. The expression "looking for a needle in a haystack" came to mind.

Just as I arrived at the cemetery she texted to say she had found a Murtagh gravestone!

We had an excited 3 way text going with my friend and we all cheered.

And we let out another cheer when my friend confirmed it was her great grandfather!!!!

I will say though, we made sure we didn't cheer too loudly because we didn't want to wake up the dead. 

Spurred on by our finding, we kept looking. 

We found another Murtagh gravestone and cheered again. YEAH!

And then another Murtagh gravestone! YEAH! 

Now it was really fun and the 3 way texts were super excited, despite there being a 7 hour time difference and it was the middle of the night for my friend.

Then we found another!

And another!

In total we found 6 Murtagh gravestones in the small village cemetery.

I can't say I'm dying to go back into a cemetery just yet, but, I can honestly say, I have never had so much fun in a graveyard and it was definitely the highlight of the day for all 3 of us.