Graveyard, Deerpark, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard with no visible gravemarkers is an unusual thing.
At Deerpark, on the south bank of the Bride river in County Cork, a roughly square enclosure of about sixty metres across sits quietly deteriorating, its boundary formed by a low stone-faced earthen bank overgrown with ash and elder trees, and on its northern side by a sheer natural drop. A farm track cuts straight through it from corner to corner, and somewhere near the centre there is a depression around three metres across that shows signs of quarrying at some point within living memory. Whatever was once here, the ground has been significantly disturbed, and nothing that looks like a headstone or grave marker survives above the surface.
The site has two names, which is itself telling. The Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, produced in the nineteenth century, record it as Killawillin Church, a name with the familiar Irish element 'cill', meaning a church or monastic cell. Locally, however, it has long been known as Carraig na Cille, meaning roughly 'the rock of the church', a name recorded by the historian Power in 1918. That older local name suggests the site was remembered in the landscape through oral tradition even as its physical remains fell further into obscurity. Those remains are fragmentary: a rectangular church measuring approximately eight metres east to west and just over six metres north to south, with overgrown traces of three walls still discernible to a maximum height of about 0.8 metres, and a rubble mound marking the western end. The form and scale are consistent with an early medieval Irish church, a simple single-cell structure of the kind associated with the earliest Christian settlement of the countryside.
The site is reached by a laneway from the north, about 400 metres south of Bridebridge village. The interior is uneven and covered in ground vegetation, so walking it requires some care. The church fragments are towards the southern half of the enclosure, and the overgrown wall traces along the north, south, and east sides are easiest to read once you are standing among them rather than looking in from the boundary.
