At Rossagh in north Cork, what was once a clearly defined burial ground has left no trace of a single grave marker or visible burial. Where there should be headstones, inscriptions, kerbing, or at least the faint humps of settled ground, there is only an unenclosed spread of overgrowth around the ruin of the old parish church. The dead, if they remain, have made themselves entirely invisible.

The site first appears with some clarity on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, where it is drawn as a trapezoidal enclosure of roughly thirty metres east to west and forty metres north to south, its boundary marked by a broken line running north to south and by the curving road that forms its western edge, with the church sitting in the north-east corner. By the time the equivalent maps of 1906 and 1937 were produced, the depicted area had shrunk considerably, to something closer to twenty by twenty-five metres, though whether this reflects a genuine change on the ground or a revision in how the surveyors interpreted what they saw is difficult to say. No enclosing wall or earthwork is now apparent. The place that emerges from this cartographic sequence is one that has been quietly contracting across the generations. What lends the site an additional layer of interest is its identification by the scholar Power, writing in 1932, as the location of "Rosach na Righraidhi", a place mentioned in the medieval Irish territorial tract known as Crichad an Chaoilli, a document associated with the Fermoy region and its early political geography. The name itself suggests a place of some standing, and the church ruin nearby, together with a possible ringfort recorded about fifty metres to the south, hints at a settlement of some antiquity. That such a place should now be illegible at ground level, its burial markers gone and its boundaries dissolved into undergrowth, is the quietly strange thing about Rossagh.