Burial ground, Kilgarvan, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Beneath the former playground of a boys' school on the west side of Middleton Street in Cobh, there may be a burial ground that has left not a single visible trace above the surface.
No headstone, no enclosure wall, no hollow in the ground. Nothing at all to suggest that the living once walked over the dead during morning break.
The only record of it comes from a reference by Coleman in 1894, who noted a graveyard in the playground of the Cove Male National School. The school itself occupied the site under its older name, drawing on the original designation of Cobh as "the Cove", which the town was commonly called before it was renamed in the nineteenth century. By the time a survey team examined the location in 1995, there was nothing left to see. Whether the burial ground had been disturbed, built over, or simply lost beneath successive layers of ground work is not recorded. It survives now only as a footnote, a place that exists more convincingly on paper than it does in the earth.
