That is, in a sense, the point. Beside a disused famine road in mid Cork lies a site identified by local tradition as a famine grave, a place where victims of the Great Famine of the 1840s were buried, often hastily and without the usual rites, in ground that carried no formal designation. The low mound that once marked the spot has since been removed, and there is no longer any visible surface trace of the burials beneath.

The road beside which the grave lies is itself a relic of the same catastrophe. Famine roads were constructed under public relief schemes during the late 1840s, intended to provide wages to the starving in exchange for labour. Many were built to serve no practical purpose, connecting nowhere to nowhere, and most fell out of use within a generation. The one at Cúil An Bhuacaigh is now disused, its original function long gone. The grave on its northern side survives only in local memory and in the record that memory produced, a fragile kind of preservation that depends entirely on people continuing to know and say what happened here.