County Limerick, as readers will know from 'Iverus Trail' in the magazine section of this website, boasts an exceptional number of Carnegie Library buildings, in themselves an architectural distinction. From Westropp, we know that the county also has more tower houses, 'castles' as they are familiarly called in Ireland, than any other on the island. The county can claim one other architectural distinction: that of being, as Maurice Craig put it, 'uncommonly well endowed' - with mausoleums.

We need not recoil at the morbidity of this. Mausolea, in the Latin plural, are, again as Maurice Craig has it, 'a class of building sometimes worthy of closer study'; they are also, he points out, relative to population and perhaps even absolutely, more numerous in Ireland than in England. This may say something about land tenure and its contested history in Ireland. Indeed, Craig wryly adds that 'Not infrequently one has the impression that a family finds in death a greater splendour in habitation than it ever enjoyed in life.'

It is the ornate detail of funerary architecture, evident often of a dutiful love and respect for the deceased, even if the subtext is that of social statement, that is the focus of the following gallery of images. The gallery follows Maurice Craig's listing, in location sequence. That community-driven restoration projects have happily restored some of the structures, is testimony to the significance attributed to these stone housings of lineage. 

See Maurice Craig: 'Mausoleums in Ireland' in Studies; An Irish Quarterly Review, vol.64, no. 256 (Winter, 1975), pp.410-423 

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