On the north-eastern edge of Kilcaskan Graveyard in County Cork, a field once held several earthen mounds, some round, some rectangular, that were recorded in 1992 as possible hut sites. They are gone now, replaced by a car park installed by Cork County Council sometime after that survey was made. Whatever lay beneath them was never excavated, never formally interpreted, and is now, in any practical sense, inaccessible.

What makes the disappearance quietly melancholy is what local tradition held those mounds to be. They were said to be the remains of monks' cells belonging to a monastery founded by St. Caskan, the early Irish saint from whom the placename derives. Early medieval monastic enclosures in Ireland often consisted of small individual cells clustered near a church or graveyard, with each monk occupying a separate, modest structure, and the mix of round and rectangular forms recorded here would be consistent with that kind of settlement pattern across different periods of use. St. Caskan himself is a figure about whom very little survives in the written record, which makes the physical traces all the more significant. The adjacent graveyard presumably marks the spiritual centre of whatever community once gathered here, and it continues to function as a burial ground today.

The site sits beside the graveyard, which remains findable, though visitors looking for any surface evidence of the mounds themselves will find nothing. The car park that replaced them is, in its way, the whole story.