Carved in Stone: Preserving a Community's Heritage

Supported by the Royal Irish Academy, Carved in Stone: Preserving a Community's Heritage is a National Heritage Week programme exploring how gravestones, memorial inscriptions and historic burial landscapes preserve the history, identity and collective memory of communities across generations. Bringing together local history, archaeology, genealogy and cultural heritage, the programme reveals how communities have preserved their stories in stone—from local burial grounds in North Cork to the wider Irish diaspora in Canada. Canadian historian Patrick Leahy and Irish archaeologist John Tierney combine video, Canadian gravestone displays, storytelling and historical research to examine legacies preserved in paper, stone, wood and memory. In 1825, more than 750 people from the Cork, Limerick and Tipperary borderlands emigrated together to Canada as part of the Robinson Emigration. Many of these families settled alongside one another in Douro Township, where they were later joined by hundreds of relatives from home. Few communities in North America were so strongly connected to the slopes and valleys of the Galtees and Knockmealdowns. Their gravestones preserve the names of home parishes, family connections and memories carried across the Atlantic. Through historical research and gravestone archaeology in both Douro and North Cork, supported by a Royal Irish Academy research grant, families such as the Condons of Brigown and the Mohers of Kilworth have been traced from the 1570s to the present day, revealing stories of migration, hardship, resilience and success.