Digging for Yorick

In short order 10 years ago, my best-ever MiL, and her mother died in the same calendar year.  Their graves were marked with generic undertaker's temporary crosses (a snip at €149.95) until the family could manifest a more permanent marker. Eventually the family network turned up a Master Craftsman [advertisement!] and monumental mason who chipped out a tall white spare holey (sic) sculpture inspired by The Cross of Agadez. Tom the Rock suggested name plates [N = 3] and epitaph carved on slate squircles, running down the vertical leg of the cross. And it was so . . .

. . . except for the four digits to mark Pat the Salt's endpoint. When the cross was erected, he was still determined to live forever get the Presidential bonus for passing 100 years. That was several years in the future and, surprizingly, nobody was prepared to have a punt on how long he'd last. Pat didn't make his centenary but he died in October last year. Tom is getting on himself, so adding "1925 - 2024" was not something to be indefinitely delayed. 

The original items of script had been added in the Glendon atelier in Loughrea: in the dry, on a horizontal work bench at a convenient height. For just 4 digits, it was clearly a case of Mohammed coming to the mountain Déise rather than the other way about. A date was fixed and Tom requested-and-required that someone dig a 600 x 600 x 600 mm hole in front of the work-surface, so that he could sit at his work with his feet out of the way below grade. This off piste grave-digging was cleared with the Parish Office; and someone was BobTheShovellist.  

We set off from Caislean Blob on the first Friday of May with a mattock; a short D-handled garden spade; a long-handled navvy's shovel and a One Tonne bulk-material bag. An hour later, I was breaking ground and an hour after that, I had dug down almost to Pat's nose and transferred ~300kg of clay-and-rocks into the big bag. 

We left to get breakfast at the Copper Coast Geopark Visitor's Centre: Seri's home-made bakewell tart is to be recommended. As we left, Tom arrived with his (rather more delicate) tools and set to work a-lettering; telling us to return at 12:45.

It was [gravity assist!] a lot easier to drop the clay back in the hole than it had been removing it. Because 1-tonne-bag, the second half of the spoil could be blurfed in all at once rather than by the shovelful. We stood around for a bit at the graveside feeling delighted with 1) project closure, 2) the weather and 3) being alive and not, like, down-under. Then we repaired to Mount Congreve for lunch. Where, at (76+70+69)/3 = 72 y.o. we more-or-less matched the average age of the clientele . . . which was about 3x the age of the minimum wage servers.

In many parts of rural Ireland it is still the custom for the neighbours to dig the grave while the family are waking the deceased. As I write above, it took unfit office-handed me one hour to create a 600x600x600mm hole. A grave at 600x2000x2000mm requires about 10x as much soil removed. But it doesn't take 10 times as long: because  a) participants take turns shovelling and joshing b) there's more elbow room in a bigger hole.