Entrance and wall of graveyard, Oldstone Road, Muckamore, Antrim, Co Antrim

Entrance and Wall of Graveyard, Oldstone Road, Muckamore

This is an early Victorian entrance gateway and front boundary wall designed in a well-proportioned Tudor Revivalist style, displaying well-executed sculptural elements. The structure occupies a pleasant and unspoiled setting in association with a burial ground of considerable antiquity.

The graveyard is irregularly shaped with a Tudor-arched sandstone entrance facing west. The gateway is constructed of sandstone ashlar and is flanked by diagonal buttresses with a projecting plinth featuring moulded weathering; the two-stage buttresses are also finished with moulded weatherings. The chamfered arch comprises three stages and is crowned by a deeply moulded hood with large carved head stops. The spandrel panels are decorated with late Gothic foliage carving. Above the archway sits a crenellated parapet rising to a small central gable; Gothic panelled pinnacles mark each extremity of the parapet, rising from moulded corner corbels (the finial on the north side is now missing). The archway contains a pair of double cast-iron gates featuring cusped panelling in Perpendicular Gothic style with spear-headed finials.

The gateway is flanked on each side by snecked basalt wing walls that curve forward at their ends and continue to form the front boundary walls of reduced height, ending at each extremity with large square piers capped in moulded sandstone and topped with large octagonal finials. The wing walls and front boundary walling are capped with moulded sandstone copings, with raised moulded copings at the wing extremities. Short set-back boundary retaining walls of basalt rubble extend beyond each end pier.

Inside the gates, the graveyard rises sharply in level, accessed by a flight of stone steps bordered by modern wooden rails. Beyond the wing walls the level is raised, with the front boundary walling serving as retaining walls. The graveyard surface is grassed and uneven, containing a number of headstones and iron-railed enclosures of no special architectural merit. The oldest recorded grave dates to 1751; most others are of 19th-century date. The boundary walls to the sides and rear are of basalt rubble finished with granite copings on the western portions and basalt rock copings on the eastern sections. The rear face of the archway is of unornamented ashlar, whilst the rear face of the wing walls is of basalt rubble.

The graveyard stands in a rural setting facing the main road, with a pavement across the front. Mature trees surround the site to the sides and rear. Directly opposite the main entrance, across the road, stands a 19th-century house with Tudor-arched openings.

The precise date of the entrance and boundary wall is not documented, but the present outline of boundary walling appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1857 and was not erected until after 1838. Stylistically, the gateway dates from the 1840s and may be attributed to the architect Charles Lanyon, who was responsible for designing the nearby St Jude's Church of Ireland, built between 1839 and 1841. The graveyard itself is of long standing, being referred to in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of the 1830s as "a very ancient burial ground". The same source described 'Muckamore graveyard' as "the principal place of interment for the neighbourhood and is used as such by all classes and persuasions, but no particular family nor one of any note are interred in it. There are not any carved or sculpted slates, nor any of antiquity, the oldest inscription which can be traced being that of 1717 … This burial ground is not in the charge of anyone. It is consequently in a most neglected confused and irregular state, grown over with weeds and brambles, badly enclosed and without a gate in its entrance. It is said that there had been one, but that it had been removed in order to remove the only grounds upon which a claim for levying tithes from the grange could be founded." The structure lies within the area of historic monument number ANT50:76.