Guided Tours of Cemeteries

A group of cross community women from the Strabane area will be treated to a guided tour of Derry City Cemetery and the IOSAS prayer gardens and have a Q&A afterwards. The IOSAS Centre (Island of saints and scholars) is Ireland's only such garden and is set in six acres of natural bog land, approximately 10 minutes outside the city of Derry. Here we invite you to step back in time to an Ireland of saints and scholars, a people who had a very strong sense of creation, a robust attitude to religious practice and who believed in a close relationship with nature. You will be overwhelmed with admiration for the picturesque and traditionally built Celtic church of St. Canice and shelter of St. Dympna, both of which boast Celtic thatched roofs utilising the plentiful, cheap materials like grasses and straw of the local area to reflect its surrounding by incorporating them into the fabric of their built dwellings which in turn seem not to be out of place with the natural surroundings.