Burial ground, Dromkeen By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
A burial ground that does not appear on either the first or second editions of the Ordnance Survey maps occupies a curious position in the landscape of West Cork: it exists in the archaeological record, yet it was effectively invisible to the surveyors who mapped Ireland with considerable thoroughness during the nineteenth century.
That absence is itself a kind of information, suggesting a site that had already been forgotten, obscured, or simply overlooked long before anyone thought to catalogue it.
The ground lies in pasture at Dromkeen in County Cork, though any attempt to examine it closely is frustrated by heavy overgrowth that renders the area inaccessible. It is the sort of place that accumulates silence: no cartographic trace from the great mapping surveys, no clear path in, and vegetation that has closed over whatever physical evidence remains at the surface. The Ordnance Survey's first and second editions, produced across the nineteenth century, were generally meticulous in recording burial grounds, ruined churches, and other features of the older landscape, so a site that escaped both passes is genuinely unusual rather than merely unexcavated.