Burial ground, Pulla, Co. Waterford
Co. Waterford |
Burial Grounds
A large rectangular enclosure in rough pasture at the head of a south-to-north valley in County Waterford holds a quiet and somewhat unresolved place in the local record. Measuring roughly a hundred metres by eighty, it is defined by stone-clad field banks and sits beside a stream that runs along its eastern edge. Despite its scale, it appears on no Ordnance Survey map before the 1926 six-inch edition, and the ground itself yields little visible evidence of what, if anything, lies beneath it.
The site is associated with two distinct episodes of mass death. It is thought to have served as a burial ground for victims of the Great Famine of the 1840s, though the physical evidence for this is thin. What is better documented is its use during a plague in 1867, which is recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books, the nineteenth-century field notebooks compiled during the mapping of Ireland that often preserved local place-name lore and community memory alongside geographical detail. A memorial to famine victims was erected at the site in 1951, giving the place a commemorative function that somewhat outpaces the archaeology. Testing carried out in 2007 on an adjacent area to the south-west, covering a footprint of roughly 140 metres by 100 metres, produced no archaeological material at all. Whether the burials, if they exist, are concentrated within the banked enclosure itself, or whether the ground was used more informally and left little trace, remains an open question.