Graveyard, Kilquane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Along the northern bank of the Clyda river in mid Cork, a small graveyard sits enclosed on three sides by earthen banks and on the fourth by the river itself.
What makes the site quietly arresting is the near-total absence of inscription. The southern half of the enclosure is covered by low grave markers set out in lines, none of them bearing any text or name, and a large flat slab measuring roughly two metres in length lies on the surface with its long axis pointing west-south-west to east-north-east, possibly covering a burial beneath. Whoever lies here left no legible record of themselves.
The enclosure is roughly rectangular, about forty metres east to west and thirty metres north to south. The earthen bank along the western side was built in the early nineteenth century, while the northern and eastern banks are stone-faced. Inside the western bank, the foundations of an earlier stone wall run parallel to it, suggesting the boundary of the site was reworked at some point. A small stone-lined drain, lintelled and only about twenty centimetres wide, was built into the river bank on the western side of those wall foundations; some of its lintels have since been removed and lie scattered nearby. The northern half of the enclosure holds the remains of a church. The site had become heavily overgrown before the local community cleared it in 1993. Close by, a holed stone sits roughly forty metres to the north-west, and a tumulus, a low burial mound of prehistoric origin, lies in a field about fifty metres to the west, suggesting the area had been a focus of human activity across a very long span of time.
