Burial ground, Aghaneenagh, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Aghaneenagh in north Cork, a burial ground exists that had gone unrecorded on Ordnance Survey maps for nearly a century.
The 1842 and 1904 six-inch surveys made no mention of it. Only in 1937 did it appear on an OS map, and even then the context was unusual: the burial ground was marked not as a standalone site but as lying within a ringfort, one of those circular earthwork enclosures of early medieval origin that still dot the Irish countryside in their thousands. A church site was noted nearby as well, suggesting this was once a small ecclesiastical settlement, the kind of modest rural foundation that left almost no trace above ground.
The physical evidence at the site is slight. No visible burials have been recorded on the surface, only a faint stony hollow inside the bank in the south-western quadrant, which may hint at where the dead once lay. A more telling detail comes from a note published by Bowman in 1934, recording that around 1916 a stone measuring roughly three feet by two was discovered close to the church site. It was cross-inscribed, the kind of simple incised cross commonly associated with early Christian burial and devotion in Ireland, and it would have been a significant find. Instead, it was built into a nearby fence, its ecclesiastical carving folded into the mundane work of enclosing a field. Whether the stone survives in that fence, or has since been disturbed or removed, is not recorded.