John Tierney's blog

GraveSnap is the Historic Graves survey app for iPhone, built from three decades of recording Irish graveyards and now open for wider use. It is a professional tool, designed for systematic surveys of burial grounds laid out in rows, and it follows a simple field rhythm: number the monument, photograph it, describe it, and move on to the next. Each row is walked in sequence, and the app uses the phone’s GPS along that walk to place every monument on the map.

Every parish in Ireland has an historic graveyard with stories to tell, and the communities who care for them are best placed to tell them. As part of the EU-funded SECreTour project, we are now researching how these places could be linked into a national historic graveyards trail, a network of walkable, locally curated routes that bring visitors into parishes and their burial grounds.

Every parish in Ireland has an historic graveyard with stories to tell, and the communities who care for them are best placed to tell them. As part of the EU-funded SECreTour project, we are now researching how these places could be linked into a national historic graveyards trail, a network of walkable, locally curated routes that bring visitors into parishes and their burial grounds.

Are oo from Cork

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lrhz6w2Ny2IASy33aBcVCR3ry0LgWhuJ/view?u...

Douro Workshop https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SjtvUeBqWyX3XnfBFVSkx5S2WE2eGO6X...

3SimpleSteps_AaM_Portlaois_2026_v3.pdf

Saint Declan's grave, Ardmore, Co. Waterford, is potentially the oldest known extant Christian grave in Ireland. A site of pilgrimage since the Early Medieval period it is now enclosed in a small stone building originally built as a 9th century shrine chapel (An Beannacháin).

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1v_b_ZC5NRHaw5VhRpIUNONMMOKmZqKnt/view?u...

This is the script of a talk given by John Tierney on Sunday 6th July 2025 , in Douro village, Ontario as part of the Douro 200th Anniversary of the Peter Robinson Settement which brought around 500 Irish families from southern Ireland to northern Ontario. Those families put down deep roots in the area while also spreading across the rest of the continent. John was invited by the Douro 200th Anniversary committee to attend, survey their local cemeteries, and give this talk.

Introduction