Graveyard, Ballinluig, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that has been in continuous use for well over a century sits on the southern edge of Ballyfeard village in County Cork, and it carries within its boundaries the ghost of a church that had already been forgotten long before anyone thought to record the fact.
The enclosure is sub-rectangular, roughly fifty metres east to west and forty metres north to south, bounded on the west and north by a stone wall and on the east and south by a stone-faced earthen bank that curves gently at its south-eastern corner. On the gateway in the north wall there is a plaque bearing the date 1783, though the accompanying text has worn to illegibility. Similar plaques appear at two other sites nearby, suggesting some coordinated effort at commemoration or dedication in the late eighteenth century, the exact purpose of which is now impossible to recover.
The parish church of Ballyfeard once stood inside this same enclosure, and its decline was both rapid and thorough. By 1615 it was already recorded as being in ruins. A description from 1704 noted it was 'almost level with the ground', and when the site was examined again around 1860, no physical trace of the building remained at all. A church reduced to rubble within a century, then erased entirely within another century and a half, is not unusual in post-Reformation Ireland, where the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left many parish churches abandoned and unmaintained. What is quietly striking here is the completeness of the disappearance. The graveyard continued to receive the dead, the earliest surviving headstones dating to the 1860s, but the building that gave the ground its original purpose had long since been absorbed back into the earth, leaving no above-ground trace for anyone to examine or mourn.