Graveyard, Dunisky, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Dunisky, Co. Cork

On a small hillock in mid Cork, a graveyard occupies the flat summit in near-perfect anonymity.

There are no headstones, no inscriptions, no visible markers of any kind. The ground rises steeply on the eastern and southern sides, and what remains of the boundary is a low, denuded earthen bank to the north, barely half a metre high, with traces of levelled banks elsewhere following the natural break in the slope. The interior is uneven, its low undulations suggesting either generations of burials or the ghost of old cultivation ridges, and it is now simply pasture.

At the slightly off-centre point of this hilltop site stands a four-storey tower house, once associated with the parish church of Dunisky. The church itself has effectively been erased. A 1615 ecclesiastical report stated that no remains of it survived in the parish at all, yet Samuel Lewis, writing in 1837, still noted the ruins of a small building within the graveyard. The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842 went further, depicting a ruinous structure on the eastern side of the tower. By the account of Fitzgerald, writing in 1930, some remnants were still visible as late as the 1860s, until a former owner of the property deliberately cleared away whatever was left of both the church and the graveyard. What remains of the church today is a slight grass-covered platform, roughly 24 metres east to west and 10 metres north to south, immediately west of the tower, discernible only as a shallow rise in the ground. The deliberate destruction of a burial site and its associated church is unusual enough to give pause; that it was done within living memory of people Fitzgerald could have spoken to makes it feel stranger still.

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