Mound, Kilquane, Co. Cork

Co. Cork |

Ritual/Ceremonial

Mound, Kilquane, Co. Cork

A small earthen mound sitting in level pasture about thirty metres west of Kilquane church and graveyard is protected by law, but it may owe its survival more immediately to guilt and superstition than to any official order.

The mound is modest in scale, roughly 1.35 metres high and about 4.4 metres in diameter, with some stone facing visible beneath what was, until relatively recently, a thick tangle of overgrowth. What sets it apart is not its size but the story attached to it.

According to local tradition recorded by the historian and antiquarian James Grove-White in the early twentieth century, a local man removed a tree from the spot and subsequently fell ill. Connecting his misfortune to the disturbance, he replaced the tree and then built the mound specifically to protect it. The story belongs to a well-documented current of Irish folk belief surrounding certain trees, particularly those growing on or near ancient or sacred ground, where interference was understood to invite consequences. Grove-White himself, writing between 1905 and 1925, observed that the mound "looks like a mound over an ancient grave", suggesting that whatever motivated its construction or elaboration in more recent memory, the site may overlie something considerably older. The mound was cleared of overgrowth in 1993, which at least restored its visible profile after years of encroachment.

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