Burial ground, Rathdrought, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Rathdrought, Co. Cork

In a gently sloping field at Rathdrought in West Cork, there is a burial ground that has, to all practical purposes, ceased to exist above ground.

The roughly rectangular enclosure that once marked it is heavily overgrown, and the site is now used as a dump. No visible surface trace remains. It is the kind of place that survives only as a cartographic memory.

The site was recorded as a cill on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1939. A cill, from the Irish word for a church or cell, typically refers to an early medieval ecclesiastical enclosure, often associated with a small burial ground that predates the formal parish system introduced after the twelfth-century church reforms. These sites are scattered across Ireland in considerable numbers, many of them known only from placename evidence or old maps, their physical fabric long since absorbed into the surrounding farmland. At Rathdrought, even the enclosure that might once have hinted at such a history is now barely legible in the landscape.

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Pete F
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