Burial ground, Baurgorm, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Baurgorm, Co. Cork

On a slope in West Cork that now serves as tillage land, a raised patch of ground holds the dead, though nothing on the surface announces the fact.

No headstones, no enclosing wall of the kind you might expect, and no visible grave markers of any sort. The ground is heavily overgrown, and a casual eye passing over the field would find little reason to pause.

The site was recorded as a burial ground on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which means whoever was mapping the landscape at that time recognised it as such, even if memory of who was buried there, or when, had already grown faint. What survives physically is a raised trapezoidal area, roughly 23 metres along its north-south axis and varying in width from just under 9 metres to a maximum of 23 metres. It is partially enclosed by a low earthen bank, standing about 0.8 metres high, which runs along the southern and western sides. There is a deliberate break in the western bank near its southern end, which may have served as an entrance. The trapezoidal shape and the earthen enclosure suggest a planned, bounded space, the kind of modest demarcation communities once used to set the dead apart from the land of the living, even where stone was unavailable or the burial informal.

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Pete F
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