Burial ground, Curraghs, Co. Cork
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Burial Grounds
There is a burial ground at Curraghs in County Cork that has, in a sense, lost its own location.
The six rough stones that once projected a few inches above the surface to mark graves were recorded by Bowman in 1934, but by the time anyone went looking again, the ringfort enclosing them had been almost entirely levelled, and no visible trace of the markers remained.
The burial ground and an associated church site were recorded as lying within Kilpatrick fort, a ringfort, which is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure of the early medieval period, typically defined by a raised bank and ditch. Bowman's 1934 account placed everything clearly enough within that enclosure. What complicates matters is a persistent local belief that neither the church nor the burial ground were ever there at all, but rather in a separate ringfort approximately ninety metres to the east, which has itself been levelled. Both the physical evidence and the oral memory, then, point to structures that can no longer be verified on the ground. The record preserves two overlapping claims and no means of resolving them.