Burial ground, Cullomane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In a pasture on a south-facing slope in Cullomane, County Cork, there is a small raised platform in the ground that most people walking past would take for a natural undulation in the field.
It is not. The slightly elevated, subcircular area, roughly nine metres east to west and six and a half metres north to south, and raised about half a metre above the surrounding land, is a burial ground. There are no headstones, no kerbing, no markers of any kind. The vegetation has been left to its own devices. Nothing announces what the place is.
What makes it stranger still is its absence from the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, which was a remarkably thorough cartographic exercise for its time. That omission suggests the site had already slipped out of active use or common knowledge by the mid-nineteenth century, or perhaps it was never formally recognised by the surveyors who passed through. Unnumbered, unmarked burial grounds of this type are not unusual in the Irish countryside. They include the graves of unbaptised infants, commonly known as cillíní, as well as older community burial sites that predate the consolidation of parish graveyards under Church authority. Without excavation it is impossible to say with confidence who lies here or when they were interred, but the raised, subcircular form is a shape that recurs across sites of considerable antiquity in Cork and throughout the west of Ireland.