Graveyard, Kilmagner, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Kilmagner, Co. Cork

What is immediately curious about this graveyard in Kilmagner is how much of it was apparently invisible to the cartographers of 1842.

When the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map that year, only the north-western corner of the enclosure was recorded, covering a fraction of the ground that the full site actually occupies. The church ruin near the south-eastern corner was not shown at all. It is the kind of discrepancy that suggests a place already well into a long decline, its edges blurred by encroaching vegetation, its boundaries no longer legible from the road.

The graveyard itself is rectangular, roughly 62 metres on its longer axis, enclosed by an earthen bank that has grown over with vegetation. A piered gate near the western end of the north side provides the entrance. Inside, mature trees punctuate the interior, and the undergrowth has at some point been cleared and the ground grassed over. The headstones are not evenly distributed across the enclosure; they cluster from around the centre of the northern boundary westward, and low uninscribed grave markers, the kind that predate or simply bypassed the conventions of lettered stone, are concentrated to the north and west of centre. The earliest legible headstone carries a date of 1782, though the uninscribed markers hint at burials that are older still and simply leave no name behind. The ruined church that occupies the south-eastern corner belongs to a separate record, but its presence confirms that this was an active ecclesiastical site long before the eighteenth century.

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Pete F
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