Burial ground, Gortnamona, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On the crest of a ridge in Gortnamona, County Cork, a burial ground sits in the middle of farmland that has long since been turned to tillage.
What makes it quietly unsettling is the situation: the dead interred here are not in a churchyard or behind a wall, but on a high exposed ridge, surrounded by crops, the ground partially ploughed away over the years. A few grave markers survive, though the overall boundary of the site is now defined more by overgrowth than by any formal enclosure. It is the kind of place that a farmer works around rather than through, the sort of irregularity in a field that resists being fully absorbed into the agricultural routine.
The earliest reliable record of the site is cartographic. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 marks it plainly as a burial ground, which tells us that by the mid-nineteenth century it was already recognised as such, even if its origins were not precisely documented. Whether it predates that map by decades or by centuries is not recorded. What is clear is that the intervening years have not been kind to it. Ploughing has eaten into the site, and whatever defined its edges in 1842 has since given way to the gradual pressure of cultivation. The grave markers that remain are noted without further description, their number or condition unspecified, but their presence is enough to confirm that this was, at some point, a place of deliberate and organised burial.