Burial ground, Corbally, Co. Dublin

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Corbally, Co. Dublin

Somewhere in a field called the Claishfield, on the lands of Corballis in County Dublin, local people were buried during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The exact spot has never been pinned down. No headstones mark it, no wall encloses it, and the ground gives no obvious sign of what lies beneath. It is the kind of place that exists more in the historical record than on any map.

The burial ground is recorded in the Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable series of antiquarian notes compiled in the nineteenth century as part of the wider project to survey and document Ireland's landscape and placenames. These letters frequently preserved local knowledge that would otherwise have been lost entirely, including references to sites that were already half-forgotten by the time they were written down. According to Michael Herity's 2001 study, which drew on those letters, the Claishfield was used as a burial ground by local inhabitants around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Whether it was associated with a parish church, a chapel, or simply used as common ground in a period when formal ecclesiastical burial was not always accessible to everyone, the notes do not say. The research was compiled by Geraldine Stout and Padraig Clancy, with a revised record uploaded in July 2018.

Because the site has not been precisely located, there is nothing specific to visit in the conventional sense. The Corballis lands lie in the Donabate area of north County Dublin, and the Claishfield name may survive in local usage or older estate records, though tracking it down would require some archival patience. For anyone with an interest in the quieter corners of the Irish landscape, this kind of unlocated site carries its own particular quality: the knowledge that something is there, somewhere underfoot, without the certainty of knowing exactly where.

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Corbally, Co. Dublin
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Ref: DU02500

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