Burial Place, Reen By.), Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On a west-facing slope of rough grazing land near Reen in West Cork, a burial ground sits so overgrown and altered that its own boundaries are now almost impossible to trace.
The Ordnance Survey's first edition map of 1842 marked it as a triangular area and labelled it simply 'Burial Place', while the 1902 six-inch revision recorded a second, smaller rectangular enclosure about 30 metres to the east, this one named 'Burial Ground (Disused)'. Two mapped areas, two different shapes, a gap of sixty years between their recording, and a name that had already passed into the past tense: there is something quietly unresolved about this place before you have even set foot near it.
The site is known locally as Cill an Chuais, an Irish name meaning 'church of the recess or hollow', suggesting an early ecclesiastical connection of the kind found across rural Ireland, where small burial grounds often cluster around the memory of a long-vanished chapel or hermitage. In the 1930s, Vice Admiral Boyle Somerville, a noted local antiquarian, excavated here and uncovered 28 burials. Somerville is perhaps better remembered in the region for his work recording prehistoric stone alignments, but his digging at Cill an Chuais added considerably to what was known of the site. Among the finds, local information records a stone-lined grave in the north-east corner of the burial ground, measuring roughly one metre by one metre and about one metre deep, a modest but carefully constructed feature. Close by, approximately 40 metres to the north-east, there is a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber of the type commonly associated with early medieval settlement in Ireland, though its relationship to the burial ground remains unclear. The southern bank of the enclosure has since been removed to make way for a new laneway, leaving only a steep scarp to define the northern side.