Cairn, Ballydague, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Cairns

Cairn, Ballydague, Co. Cork

There is a hilltop in Ballydague, in north County Cork, where cartographers once marked something that can no longer be seen.

The site is scrub-covered and rounded, and if you were to visit today, you would find no visible trace of any cairn, the kind of prehistoric stone mound typically raised over a burial or used to mark a prominent point in the landscape. What makes the place quietly puzzling is not what is there, but what the maps say used to be.

The Ordnance Survey's first six-inch map of the area, produced in 1842, places a cairn on this hilltop and names it 'Seehaunnamnafinna', an Irish placename that anchors the feature to a local tradition of naming. By the time the later OS six-inch editions were published, in 1905 and again in 1935, the notation had moved. Both later maps show no antiquity on this particular hilltop at all; instead, they depict a feature called 'Seehaunnamnafinna' on an adjacent hilltop roughly 800 metres to the south-southeast, one that overlooks the Ballydague site. Whether the 1842 surveyors recorded the wrong hill, whether the name migrated in the intervening decades, or whether something was once present at Ballydague and subsequently cleared or collapsed, is not straightforwardly answered. The name itself endured even as the location it described shifted between editions.

What remains is a small cartographic puzzle, a named place that drifted across the landscape over the course of a century of mapping, leaving one hilltop officially blank and another carrying the name that once belonged to its neighbour.

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Pete F
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