Burial ground, Coolroe, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In a north-facing pasture in Coolroe, a patch of stony ground marks what was once a burial place, though no headstones remain to say so.
The surface is the only clue, a roughness underfoot that sets it apart from the surrounding field. Enclosed loosely by trees, the roughly rectangular plot measures about 36 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, dimensions that have stayed consistent since the site first appeared on the Ordnance Survey's six-inch map of 1842, where it was labelled simply "Old Grave Yard". By 1905, the same map series had reclassified it as "Grave Yd. (Disused)", a quiet administrative acknowledgement that the place had slipped out of active use.
The site is thought to be associated with a cillin, a term used in Irish tradition for a small, informal burial ground, often located apart from consecrated parish ground and historically used for unbaptised infants or others excluded from the churchyard. This particular cillin may have formed part of a Chapel of Ease serving the parish of Litter, a secondary chapel built to spare parishioners a long journey to the main church. Writing in 1932, a scholar named Power described the cillin as covering about an acre and noted that it was marked by five old oak trees standing in the centre of the field. He also observed that tillage had been gradually eating into the cillin's boundaries, though it still retained what he called its circular outline, a shape that points to early medieval or pre-Norman origins, when circular enclosures were the standard form for sacred and funerary sites in Ireland. The rectangular dimensions recorded by later surveys may reflect that encroachment, or simply a shift in how the boundary was read across different mapping conventions.