Graveyard, Garranabraher, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, a small hachured circle, roughly fifteen metres across, sits in what was then open ground to the north of Cork city.
It is labelled "Grave Yard" with a church marked alongside it. By the time later editions of the same map were printed, both features carried the qualifier "site of", which in cartographic terms is a quiet admission that something has already been lost. Today, the ground has been levelled entirely, absorbed into a field adjoining a playing pitch in the northern suburbs. There is no visible trace of either the church or the burial ground.
Scholars have suggested this may be the location of St. Catherine's parish church, though the identification is uncertain. One line of research, cited by O'Donoghue in 1986, places the church here in Garranabraher. Another, put forward by Bradley and colleagues in 1985, argues that St. Catherine's is more plausibly associated with the area near North Gate Bridge, considerably further into the city. The question has not been definitively settled. What the map evidence does confirm is that a graveyard of modest dimensions was recorded here in the mid-nineteenth century and that, at some point between the first survey and the present day, the physical remains were removed or buried beneath ground that now shows no sign of what once occupied it.