Graveyard, Ballynabrannagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In a field of level pasture in Ballynabrannagh, a slightly raised patch of ground encloses what was once a small early church and its graveyard.
The enclosure is roughly sub-circular, measuring about 45 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, and its perimeter is defined by a stone-faced vertical edge standing roughly a metre high. A field fence cuts across its eastern side. None of this would be immediately legible to a passing eye, partly because the interior has been taken over almost entirely by rhododendrons, the kind of dense, spreading shrub that can swallow a site within a generation or two and make any kind of inspection nearly impossible.
The site contains the ruins of what local tradition calls a 'seana teampuilín', meaning, roughly, a little old church. Writing in 1917, a scholar named Power recorded that the foundations of the building were fairly traceable and measured approximately forty-eight feet by twenty-one feet internally. The church is marked on all editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, suggesting it was still recognisable as a structure through much of the nineteenth century. More recently, local knowledge has it that the lower courses of the church wall survive beneath the undergrowth, though no grave markers are visible at ground level. The absence of visible markers does not necessarily mean there are none; in many early Irish ecclesiastical sites, graves were left unmarked or were indicated only by simple stones that have long since settled below the surface or been displaced.