Burial ground, Benduff, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Benduff, Co. Cork

In a field just north of Benduff Castle in West Cork, a D-shaped patch of untilled ground sits at the edge of a working agricultural plot.

While the surrounding land has been turned over for crops, this small island has been left alone, marked at its centre by a large tree. That exemption from the plough is what identifies it: a Quaker burial ground, preserved less by formal protection than by a kind of quiet avoidance.

Quaker communities in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Ireland typically buried their dead in plain, unadorned grounds, rejecting the elaborate monuments common in other traditions. The simplicity was deliberate and theological. What makes this particular site unusual is a local tradition attached to the one visible tomb that remains: a simple rectangular structure on the north side of the central tree, marking the grave of a man named William Morris. According to that tradition, the erection of this tomb caused such distress among the local Quaker community, presumably because it departed from their customary plainness, that no further burials took place there. The ground was, in effect, abandoned as a consequence of the monument itself.

The site lies beside the road near the entrance to Benduff Castle, also known as Castle Salem, and is most easily identified by the tree rising from the otherwise flat, cultivated field. The tomb of William Morris is plain enough by most standards, but within the context of Quaker burial practice, even a simple rectangular stone structure apparently carried enough weight to bring the ground's use to an end.

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