Burial ground, Killowen, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In a pasture field in Killowen, a barely perceptible oval rise in the ground marks what was once a burial place.
It stands just 0.4 metres above the surrounding land, roughly eleven and a half metres north to south and eleven metres east to west, its outline now traced more by overgrowth than by any stonework or formal boundary. There are no grave markers. Nothing announces what this place is or was.
By 1842, when the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as 'Killowen Grave Yd.', the site was already old enough to be simply noted rather than explained. The cartographers marked it without elaboration, suggesting it was locally known but perhaps already falling out of active use. What makes the spot stranger still is the presence of a standing stone, a single upright prehistoric stone, positioned just to the north of the burial ground's centre. Standing stones of this kind are among the most ancient monuments in the Irish landscape, and their relationship to later burial grounds is rarely straightforward. Whether the stone predates the graveyard by centuries, or whether the burial ground grew up around a landmark that was already there, is not recorded. A field fence runs along the north-north-east side of the enclosure, the only modern intrusion into what is otherwise an undisturbed, if unreadable, patch of ground.