Graveyard, Mellifontstown, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Mellifontstown, Co. Cork

A roughly triangular enclosure bounded by a drystone wall, its interior smothered in high grass, with no visible grave markers remaining: the graveyard at Mellifontstown in County Cork is the kind of place that looks abandoned in the most complete sense.

Nothing announces itself. Yet beneath the grass and soil, there is evidently more than meets the eye, and tradition holds that this unassuming patch of ground is the burial place of a saint.

The site is approached by a laneway from the south and measures around 43 metres north to south, with a maximum width of 32 metres. Set into the slope toward the northern part of the interior is a sod-covered rectangular structure, roughly 3.9 metres by 2.6 metres internally, with a low mound of stone and mortar still visible within it. This may be the remains of what appeared on a 1938 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as 'Shanakill (site of)', a name that itself points to considerable age: 'seanchill' in Irish means old church, and the label 'site of' on a mid-twentieth-century map suggests the structure was already reduced to near-nothing by then. Writing in 1986, O'Donoghue recorded a local tradition that St. Eltin was buried here. Eltin is a somewhat obscure early Irish saint, and the association of a ruined enclosure with an early ecclesiastical figure follows a pattern common across Munster, where small burial grounds occupying ancient church sites persisted in use long after any formal religious life had departed.

The laneway approach from the south is the practical way in, though the high grass covering the interior makes any close examination of the ground difficult. The partially buried rectangular structure to the north of centre is the clearest feature to seek out, though it requires some searching given the sod cover.

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