Burial ground, Bawnboy, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Beneath a tilled field near Bawnboy in West Cork lies a burial ground that has entirely disappeared from the surface, yet was considered significant enough to be mapped by the Ordnance Survey in 1842.
The mapmakers labelled it a Children's Burial Ground, a term that points to a specific and quietly melancholy tradition in Irish history. These were sites, sometimes called cillíní, where unbaptised infants and occasionally others excluded from consecrated ground were interred, often at the margins of parishes, beside old boundaries, or on the edges of townlands. They were not forgotten places exactly, but they occupied an uneasy position, known to local communities yet outside the formal structures of the Church.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded the site as a subrectangular area, and that same outline appeared consistently across all three editions of the six-inch mapping programme, suggesting that the enclosure was still recognisable in some form through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. At some point, however, the ground was brought into agricultural use. Ploughing over generations has erased whatever physical boundary once defined the space, whether that was a low earthen bank, a stone kerb, or simply a kept margin of rough grass. Nothing is now visible at the surface.