Burial ground, Nadanuller More, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On a north-east-facing slope in Nadanuller More, overlooking the Glen River, a single narrow stone rises from pasture ground with almost nothing around it to suggest what it once marked.
No mound, no enclosure wall, no scatter of surface finds; just the stone, pointed at the top, and a low ledge of smaller stones circling its base like a forgotten kerb. Local memory and a single surviving upright are now all that remain of what residents once knew as a burial ground.
When the researcher Bowman visited in 1934, he recorded two stones on the site, oriented east to west in the manner typical of Christian burial, set roughly seven feet three inches apart. That paired arrangement, east-west alignment being the conventional orientation for Christian graves across Ireland, suggested a marked burial plot of some kind, though no documentary record appears to clarify when it was in use or by whom. By the time the site was surveyed more recently, only one stone remained: a narrow, well-shaped upright, 1.45 metres tall and tapering to a point, its long axis running north-west to south-east, slightly off the orientation Bowman had noted for the pair. The low stone ledge around its base, measuring roughly 65 by 45 centimetres and just 14 centimetres high, may be a later addition or a remnant of some simple setting around the grave marker itself.
What makes the place quietly unsettling is the completeness of the erasure. Burial grounds in rural Ireland, even small and informal ones, often leave some trace in the landscape, a slight rise, a change in vegetation, a cluster of stones. Here, beyond the one surviving upright, the slope gives nothing away.