Graveyard, Kilcaskan, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that holds an ogham stone is already doing something most burial grounds are not.
Ogham is an early medieval script, typically carved as a series of notches and strokes along the edge of a standing stone, and its presence here alongside a ruined church places this small enclosure in a tradition that stretches back well before the earliest legible headstone on the site, which dates only to the 1880s. The graveyard sits on level ground where the Clashduff and Adrigole rivers meet, a confluence in otherwise hilly countryside, with a southward view over Bantry Bay. It is the kind of place where the landscape does a lot of quiet work.
The enclosure is roughly rectangular, bounded by a stone-faced earthen bank, and contains the remains of a church as well as the ogham stone. A broken chest tomb, the kind of raised rectangular monument common in Irish churchyards from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is the only other notable funerary feature among the older headstones. A modern extension to the north, marked by a large modern cross, signals that the site continues in use. A short distance to the east lies a bulláun stone, a large rock bearing one or more rounded depressions, thought in many cases to have been used for grinding or possibly for ritual purposes, though their exact function is still debated. The clustering of an ogham stone, a ruined church, and a bulláun stone within a small area suggests this was a place of some local significance across several different periods.