Burial ground, Commons, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Beneath a flat stretch of pasture at Commons in County Cork lies a burial ground that has effectively vanished.
No mound, no enclosure, no scatter of stones marks the spot today. The ground gives nothing away.
What we know comes from the cartographic record. The Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842 labels the site plainly as a children's burial ground, one of hundreds of such places scattered across Ireland that served communities for whom consecrated church burial was, at various times, unavailable or forbidden. These sites, often called cillíní, were used to inter unbaptised infants and others considered outside the bounds of formal Christian burial. By the time the OS revised its mapping in 1902, the designation had shifted to 'site of', a quiet cartographic acknowledgement that even then the ground had lost whatever physical definition it once held. In the sixty years between those two surveys, the place had gone from a named and recognised feature of the landscape to a memory.