​‘The surface of this headstone is breaking up into large, thin flakes, peeling away and exposing the softer layer beneath. In the damp fissure between the two, black mould has found lodging. The texture of the spalling stone is so unusual that I can’t resist reaching out and touching it lightly with my fingertips, and to my horror the phrase Loving Memory falls off in one piece onto the grass.
 
Sandstone is particularly prone to this kind of weathering, where moisture seeps between the layers; either rising, wicked up, from the earth beneath like drink through a straw, or hurled at the face of the stone as rain, freighted with windborne salt or acid. Sometimes the entire surface is sloughed in a single sheet, the stone underneath still bearing the shape of the letters and images carved through from above. A bad case of spalling can erase the inscription, like an attack of total amnesia.’
 
Jean Sprackland – These Silent Mansions: A Life in Graveyards

​‘There are three deaths. The first when the body ceases to function. The second when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time’
 
David Eagleman -  Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives

‘Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in a chimney are no epitaph of that, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons’ graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing.’

​John Donne

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‘The rich and poor meet together: the LORD is the maker of them all.’

​King James Bible
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‘When the elections are all over
We’ll all be pushing up clover
And everyone in the graveyard votes the same’
 
Christy Moore
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On 24th March 1918, the usual weekly meeting of the Carrigaholt Sinn Fein Club was in progress. I was there and I was standing at the door. About noon, a knock came to the door which I opened. A British military officer was outside along with some soldiers carrying fixed bayonets. He asked me if I was in charge and I said "Yes". He then inquired if Michael Keane was inside. I again said "Yes". He then asked for Keane who went out to him. The officer then said to me: "You must clear this hall". I asked him what he meant by this action and said that this was a meeting of the Sinn Fein Club which we had a perfect right to hold, that we had been holding meetings Sunday without interference. He thereupon shouted an order to his men to charge and, simultaneously, soldiers with fixed bayonets burst in through the door and formed up into a square in the centre of the room. A military sergeant gave orders to clear the room.
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Some of the members got out by the back door. I was still at the front door trying to keep it open as the soldiers had begun to lunge with their bayonets and our people began to stampede. I next felt a bayonet stab in the back which caused me to let go the door, and in a rush out of the building the crowd swept me out into the street. Outside, I heard that Dr. Studdart was in Behan's Hotel and went up to see him. I found him attending to Thomas Russell, a Kerryman who was employed by the Gaelic League as an Irish teacher. Russell had been severely wounded by a bayonet thrust while at the Sinn Fein meeting. Dr. Studdert treated my wound and also those of two others who also had been bayoneted. Russell was -10-S removed to Kilrush Hospital the following morning but died that night. He was buried in Kerry.

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BMH Statement of Eamonn Fennell