Burial ground, Mohanagh, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Mohanagh, Co. Cork

In the pastureland of Mohanagh in West Cork, a children's burial ground has been swallowed so completely by vegetation that the ground itself gives nothing away.

No visible boundary, no marker, no obvious disturbance in the grass; only an old map confirms that something lies beneath.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 labels the spot plainly as a children's burial ground, a designation that points to a once-common but quietly sorrowful feature of the Irish rural landscape. These sites, known in Irish as cillíní, were used for the interment of unbaptised infants, who were excluded by Catholic doctrine from burial in consecrated ground. They tend to occupy marginal spaces, old ringfort banks, field boundaries, shorelines, and in this case a patch of ordinary farmland. The 1842 mapping places this one firmly in the record, but by the time the site was assessed for the archaeological inventory of County Cork in the early 1990s, heavy overgrowth had rendered it indistinguishable from the surrounding pasture. Whatever physical evidence once marked the ground has been absorbed into the landscape.

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Pete F
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