Graveyard, Lisleetemple, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
The name Lisleetemple carries its history openly, combining the Irish elements for fort and church in a single word, and the subrectangular graveyard here in West Cork reflects that layered past in physical form.
The roughly rectangular enclosure, with its slightly irregular edges, is the kind of shape that often betrays an ancient boundary reused across successive centuries, the outline of something older preserved beneath more recent ground.
The Church of Ireland building occupying the site stands on the foundations of an earlier church, meaning the present structure is at least the second to occupy this particular patch of ground. Headstones in the graveyard date from the late eighteenth century through to the present day, giving the burial ground a continuous span of over two hundred years of recorded interments, though the religious use of the site almost certainly predates the earliest legible stone by a considerable margin. The place-name alone suggests an ecclesiastical presence reaching back into the early medieval period, when small church sites were commonly enclosed within or adjacent to a lis, a ringfort or enclosure.