Burial ground, Drominagore, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Drominagore, Co. Cork

A field in north Cork holds what appears, at first glance, to be nothing more than a slightly uneven stretch of pasture enclosed by old earthen banks.

There are no headstones, no inscriptions, no visible trace of the dead beneath the ground. Yet this quiet enclosure near Drominagore carries a tradition linking it to one of the bloodiest engagements of seventeenth-century Ireland, and by the early twentieth century someone had already been digging into it, looking for something that was never found.

The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, labelled plainly as "Grave Yard" within a roughly wedge-shaped outline. By the time the 1905 and 1937 editions were produced, the name had quietly disappeared from the cartography, even as the physical enclosure remained. Writing in 1934, a researcher named Bowman described the burial ground as oval in shape, surrounded by a fence then standing around six feet high and, in places, twelve feet wide at the top, suggesting a substantial earthen boundary rather than a simple hedge or wall. He also recorded a large mound on the western side, measuring roughly forty-five feet by sixteen feet and four feet in height, beside which someone had dug a hole of about nine square yards and two feet deep. Local account had it that a young man had excavated the mound in search of buried treasure, and that he died shortly afterwards. The mound's origins remain unrecorded. The tradition attached to the burial ground itself is more specific: according to local memory, some of those killed at the Battle of Knocknanuss in 1647 were interred here. That battle, fought in County Cork, was a decisive and brutal engagement during the Confederate Ireland wars, in which a Catholic Confederate and Ulster Scots force was routed by a Parliamentarian army under Lord Broghill, with very heavy casualties on the Confederate side.

On the ground today, the enclosure measures roughly twenty-eight metres by thirty metres. The southern boundary survives as a low earthen bank, curving at the south-east angle, while the western side is edged by a more substantial bank of earth and stone over a metre high. The northern boundary has been largely levelled. A large depression in the south-east corner, around nine metres by thirteen metres and nearly a metre deep, is the most conspicuous feature of the interior. Whether it relates to the treasure-digging episode, to the burials themselves, or to something else entirely, the ground does not say.

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