Burial ground, Cloonlahard East, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
Somewhere in the rolling pasture of Cloonlahard East, a burial ground exists mainly as a cartographic memory.
It was recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1841, marked as a dotted circle roughly forty metres in diameter on the western side of a small stream, and then, in later editions of the same map series, it simply disappeared. No revised surveyor thought it worth marking again. Whatever once made the site legible in the landscape, whether raised ground, a boundary, a scatter of stones, had apparently ceased to be obvious, and the place quietly dropped out of the official record.
When researcher Denis Power documented the site in 2011, there was no visible surface trace of the burial ground itself. What he did note, in the vicinity of the mapped location, was a low L-shaped earthen bank, approximately five and a half metres running north to south and eight metres running east to west, rising only about sixty centimetres above the surrounding ground. The bank is interpreted as the probable remains of a field boundary rather than anything directly associated with the burials. That small qualification matters: it means the only physical feature a visitor might actually see is incidental, a fragment of agricultural infrastructure that happened to survive nearby, while the burial ground itself has left nothing detectable above the turf. The 1841 Ordnance Survey mapping, the earliest systematic large-scale survey of Ireland, was often the first occasion such features were formally recorded, and its dotted-circle convention was used to indicate uncertain or degraded enclosures, suggesting the site may already have been fading even then.
Access to the area is across private farmland, and there is nothing to orient a visitor once there; the stream on whose western bank the site was mapped is the most reliable landmark, but the ground itself offers no confirmation. The undulating pasture noted in the record means sight lines are uneven, and the low earthen bank, if it can be found at all, is the kind of feature easily mistaken for a natural rise. Anyone with a serious interest in the site would do well to consult the 1841 six-inch Ordnance Survey sheet beforehand, since that map remains the sole documentary evidence that anything was ever here.