Sligo Abbey

This is a 13th century abbey now in ruin, but much of the walls still stand, due to restoration projects in the 19th century. No current pix since we didn’t go along on Friday. It is interesting because of an indirect connection to Bram Stoker and Dracula. When Stoker was a child and often ill, his mother told him told tales of the period in 1832 when the local area was hard hit by cholera, and people were dying at a rate of fifty to a hundred a day, so that burials in the churches’ graveyards were frequent and hasty and shallow, including mass graves, into which bodies from the asylum and workhouse would be rolled wrapped in pitch-coated cloth in an attempt to contain the contagion. Legend claims that bodies were pushed into the graves with poles and some of the burials were of not-yet-dead, so anxious were people to avoid contact with the disease. The result was that body parts would sometimes re-emerge from below, given rise to the concept of the undead.