Burial, Inch, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Sites
On the western edge of Comeraportera Glen, in the marshy ground near Inch in West Cork, there is a burial site that exists today almost entirely as an idea rather than a place.
There is nothing to see at ground level; no mound, no marker, no trace of whatever once lay here. The only evidence that something was ever recognised as significant is a small rectangle inked onto the Ordnance Survey map of 1842, labelled simply "Grave", measuring roughly ten metres long and five metres wide.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey mapping of Ireland was a remarkably thorough undertaking, and the surveyors had a habit of recording features, including burials, enclosures, and ruins, that local people still knew about even when little remained above ground. The fact that this spot was named and measured suggests it held some local meaning at the time, though what kind of burial it represents, its age, who was interred there, and under what circumstances, is not recorded. A rectangular outline of those proportions could point to anything from an early medieval Christian burial to something far older. The marsh that surrounds it on the glen's western slope would not have helped preservation, and whatever surface features once existed have long since disappeared into the soft ground.