Burial ground, Dunnamark, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On the eastern shore of Bantry Bay, a shallow arc of rough ground, roughly sixteen metres long and eight metres wide, marks what appears to be a burial area with no grave markers of any kind.
No headstones, no kerbing, no inscriptions. Whatever names or dates once attached to the people interred here, if anyone was ever formally interred here at all, have not survived in any visible form.
The site is notably absent from the first two editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, those of 1842 and 1902, which means it either escaped the attention of surveyors during both exercises or was not considered significant enough to record at the time. It sits on level ground close to the shoreline, and in the same field, immediately to the north, lies a recorded battlefield site. The proximity of an unmarked burial ground to a battlefield is not, historically speaking, unusual; the dead from armed conflict were often interred quickly and without ceremony close to where they fell, in ground that carried no formal consecration and attracted no formal record-keeping. Whether that connection applies here is not established, but the spatial relationship between the two sites is difficult to ignore.