Burial Ground

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

A rectangular plot of ground, grassed over and bounded by tall hedges, with a small yew tree in the centre of a circular mound at the southern end, and a 19th century marble urn on a pedestal, two 20th century Celtic Revivalist crosses, and a 20th century flat slab at the northern end. There are also a number of short flights of stone steps arranged on various axes around the perimeter and in the centre.

The crosses are of carved granite, bearing Celtic interlaced ornamentation, each standing in its rectangular plot marked by low stone plinth walls containing gravel. They are inscribed to the memory of Lt Col Algernon William John Clotworthy Skeffington, 12th Viscount of Massereene and Ferrard, who died in 1936, and his daughter Elizabeth, who died in 1930.

The urn is dedicated to ‘Margaretta’, and its base bears various inscriptions, one of which informs us that “This blessed retreat” was “chosen, planned, formed and finished by the refined and incomparable taste of its dear departed Mistress” but it would appear that this reference to a “blessed retreat” refers not to this area but to another at Oriel Temple in Co Louth.

SETTING: The burial ground stands within the overall complex of formal gardens in Antrim Castle demesne.

Historical information

Laid out as a memorial ground reputedly in 1919 when the large urn, dedicated to Margaretta (wife of Lord Ferrard) who died in 1824, was brought here from Oriel Temple in County Louth; it assumed its present appearance in the following decades.

The area is depicted as being open on the OS map of 1832 but laid out as a formal garden on the OS map of 1857, when extended further to the south than its present limits. Despite the absence of conventional garden markings on the 1832 map, it would appear likely, however, that it had been covered with a formally laid out parterre or knot garden at that time: it seems almost certain that this is the area described in the ‘Ordnance Survey Memoirs’ of the 1830s as “a curious little parterre 27 yards square, surrounded by a beautiful lime hedge 20 feet high and laid out in the most fantastic manner. Some of the beds contain flowers, but numberless little ones laid out in every variety of shape, enclosed by boxwood edging, contain only gravel, each containing a different colour. In the centre of the parterre is a yew tree 14 feet high, in the form of an obelisk.” An illustration of c 1820 shows the yew obelisk in the foreground, a semi-circular recess in the lime hedge in the middle distance, and in the background the woodland beyond, the hedge recess being shown with a series of three arches cut through it.

The area was the focus of an archaeological excavation in 1991 which appeared to confirm that it was the parterre as described in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs.

Until recently two stone pineapples marked the entrance to the burial ground, and at one time these supported a whale-bone arch.

References – Primary Sources
1. OS Map 1832, Co Antrim 50 (shows a rectangular clearing in the gardens).
2. OS Map 1857, Co Antrim 50 (shows the rectangular plot formally laid out).
3. Original illustration by the English amateur artist Sir Philip Crampton depicting an area of the garden c 1820, in the possession of Desmond Fitzgerald, the Knight of Glin, in 1993.

Secondary Sources
1. Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Vol 29: Parishes of County Antrim XI, 1832-3, 1835-9 (Belfast, 1995), p 12 (describes in detail the parterre which preceded the graveyard function).
2. A. Smyth, The Story of Antrim (Antrim 1984), p 81.
3. B. Jupp, ‘Antrim Castle Gardens’, Moorea, Vol 10, 1993, p 33.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

This is a burial garden of 20th century date, of simple form and layout, containing memorials of some local historical interest but no special architectural interest.