Burial ground, Ardacrow, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
At a quiet road junction in Ardacrow, County Cork, a triangular patch of level ground measures roughly fifteen metres north to south and nine metres east to west.
There is nothing to see there now, no stone, no marker, no mound, and yet the ground is believed to hold the remains of men who died in a violent encounter between two of the most powerful Gaelic dynasties in Munster.
In the 1940s it was recorded that five soldiers of MacCarthy Reagh were buried at this spot following an attack on the followers of O'Sullivan Bere. The MacCarthy Reagh were a branch of the ancient MacCarthy dynasty who held considerable power in west Cork, while the O'Sullivan Bere were lords of the Beara Peninsula, and relations between the great Gaelic families of the south-west were frequently turbulent, particularly during the volatile late medieval and early modern periods. No date is attached to this particular clash, and no documentation beyond that mid-twentieth-century record appears to survive. The site is classified as a possible burial ground precisely because nothing at ground level confirms what tradition holds beneath it.
That invisibility is itself part of what makes the place quietly compelling. The junction of three roads is a setting with its own long resonance in Irish folk tradition, often associated with liminal spaces and with the burial of those who fell outside the ordinary boundaries of parish and community. Whether the soldiers were interred here by circumstance or by some older convention, the spot has held the memory of their deaths for long enough that it was still being spoken of in living memory within the last century.