No headstones break the surface. No earthworks suggest where graves might lie. The area believed to hold the dead, just inside a field fence to the south-west, now serves as a dump for rubble and stones cleared from the surrounding land. The living, in other words, have been filling in the space once set aside for the dead, almost certainly without knowing it.

This is the kind of place that survives only in memory rather than in the ground. The tradition of a burial ground here was recorded in the early 1990s as part of a systematic archaeological inventory of County Cork, but even then there was nothing visible to confirm it. In rural Ireland, such sites are not unusual. Informal or early medieval burial grounds, sometimes associated with a disused church or a children's burial ground known as a cillín, often leave no surface trace after centuries of agricultural activity. What keeps them in the record at all is the persistence of local knowledge, passed between neighbours and generations long after any physical evidence has been lost, ploughed over, or, as in this case, gradually buried under the debris of working farmland.