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. To test the idea on the ground, we have built the Historic Graves Trail Recorder, a free web app that runs in any phone or laptop's web browser. It works on two levels:
- communities can set up a graveyard trail of eight points of interest within the burial ground itself, such as a notable headstone, a famine plot or a ruined church,
- and pair it with a parish or village trail of a further eight points that leads visitors out into the surrounding landscape, past holy wells, old schoolhouses, mills and other local landmarks. Each point is captured with a photograph, a description and its GPS location, and the app works fully offline, so a poor signal in a rural graveyard is no obstacle.
Once recorded, each trail becomes a ready-to-print PDF brochure with a map, photographs and descriptions, giving every community a finished guide it can hand to visitors or display at the gate. Together, the two trails tell a fuller story, connecting the people buried in the graveyard to the places where they lived and worked. The recordings sync securely to Historic Graves, building a shared body of trails that can grow parish by parish into a national resource. The aim is simple: to give local people the tools to tell the stories of their own graveyards and parishes, and to give visitors a reason to go and find them.
