Site of Grave Yard, Leamcon, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
Some places survive only as a name on an old map.
At Leamcon in West Cork, a graveyard is recorded in precisely this way: marked and labelled on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1842, surrounding Kilmurry Church, yet leaving nothing visible on the ground today. No headstones, no boundary wall, no earthwork traces. Whatever once marked the dead here has been absorbed entirely back into the landscape.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey mapping was part of a meticulous countrywide effort to document Ireland's topography, and the surveyors were generally careful to record burial grounds, even modest or ruinous ones, when local knowledge confirmed their presence. That this graveyard was named on the map suggests it was recognised at the time as a distinct and known place, associated with Kilmurry Church. The church itself is a separate recorded site, but the graveyard surrounding it has left no archaeological trace that later investigators could identify. Whether it was cleared, built over, or simply eroded away is not known.