Burial ground, Nohaval, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Nohaval, Co. Cork

On a farm in Nohaval, County Cork, there is a field that local memory has long called Páirc an tSéipéil, the Chapel Field, and yet the field itself gives almost nothing away.

No walls, no stones, no visible outline of a building survive above ground. Whatever once stood here has been absorbed so thoroughly into the landscape that a visitor walking across it today would have no reason to pause.

When Bowman visited in 1934 and recorded the site, there was still something to describe. The burial ground and church site occupied a roughly circular area some thirty-two yards in diameter, covering about half an acre, and rising approximately two feet above the level of the surrounding field. Grass-covered mounds indicated where the chapel had stood, and a surrounding fence, though levelled, still suggested the boundary of the enclosure. Bowman noted the site on J. Daly's farm, and local knowledge at the time placed the burial ground to the south of a nearby holy well, a type of sacred spring site common across Ireland and frequently found in close association with early ecclesiastical remains. Ó Driscéoil, writing in the same year, recorded that the field immediately to the east of the holy well carried the Irish name meaning chapel field, which points to a community memory of the site persisting even as the physical evidence was fading. By the time the site was formally assessed in recent decades, no visible surface trace remained in either field.

What makes this place quietly compelling is precisely that erasure. The name survived in Irish long after the mounds that gave it meaning had gone, and two independent observers in 1934 were still able to piece together a picture from modest earthworks and local testimony. That picture no longer exists on the ground, but the field name, if it persists in local use, carries the whole history of the site within it.

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