Burial, Knockaclarig, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Sites
On a hilltop in the bogland of Knockaclarig in north Cork, there is nothing to see.
No stone, no mound, no marker of any kind breaks the surface. Yet something was here, and the local memory of it proved more durable than the object itself.
When Ordnance Survey field workers visited in 1933, they found a stone roughly five feet long, mostly buried under heather and earth, with only one end exposed a few inches above the ground, each side resting on smaller supporting stones. The 1842 and 1904 OS six-inch maps record nothing at the spot, but by 1936 the feature had been mapped as a standing stone and given the name Dallán, a term used in Irish for a small pillar or memorial stone. More telling, perhaps, was the name offered by a local resident at the time of the 1933 survey: Seán Uaig, meaning Old Grave. That phrase carries the suggestion of a burial marker, possibly a grave slab laid over a body and propped slightly off the ground on supporting stones, a form occasionally found in early medieval Irish contexts. The site lies approximately ten metres to the west-southwest of a stone row, which survives as a separate monument nearby, suggesting this area of bogland was once a more significant place in the local landscape than its current emptiness implies. The stone itself has since been removed, and no trace remains above ground.