Burial ground, Lackanagoneeny, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
Somewhere in the townland of Lackanagoneeny in County Limerick, a graveyard exists primarily as a cartographic memory.
It appears on the 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as a polygonal enclosure, an irregular many-sided shape measuring approximately 49 metres northwest to southeast and 70 metres northeast to southwest, its boundary carefully recorded by surveyors who clearly found something worth documenting. By the time the revised edition of the same map series was produced, that enclosing boundary had vanished from the record entirely, and the site had been reduced to a annotation: "Grave Yard (Site of)". The parenthetical is doing considerable work there. It marks a place that had already begun the process of forgetting itself.
The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in Ireland from the 1830s onwards, were among the most detailed national surveys undertaken anywhere in the world at that time, and their revisers were generally careful to distinguish between what still existed and what had ceased to. The shift from a mapped enclosure to a bracketed "site of" suggests that the boundary features, whether a wall, an earthen bank, or a ditch, had disappeared between the two surveys. No date for the original burial ground's use or abandonment is recorded in the available notes, and the compiler, Caimin O'Brien, uploaded the record in July 2019 without additional historical detail. What is clear is that even aerial photography, specifically Digital Globe imagery reviewed as part of the survey, reveals no surface trace of the burial ground today. The land has closed over it.
Locating the site requires working from the historic OS map, since there is nothing on the ground to guide a visitor once they arrive in the townland. The Irish Ordnance Survey's historical map layers, accessible through the geohive.ie or osi.ie platforms, allow comparison between the 1840 survey and the present landscape, which is often the most useful way to orient yourself at sites like this. Given that no surface remains are visible, the interest here is less in what can be seen and more in the act of standing at a coordinate and knowing that the ground beneath was once consecrated, once bounded, and once marked on a map with enough confidence that someone later felt the need to record its passing.