Burial ground, Knockskavane, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
On a hilltop at Knockskavane in north Cork, a field carries the Irish name "The Cill", a word that typically signals an early church or ecclesiastical enclosure.
The trouble is that what survives on the ground is not a church but the earthen ramp of a lime kiln, a structure used to burn limestone into agricultural quicklime, its ramp still measuring over eighteen metres in length. Whether the name came first and was later attached to the wrong feature, or whether cartographers in 1937 simply misread what they were looking at, is the kind of quiet puzzle that tends to accumulate around sites where memory and mapping have drifted apart.
The 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map marks the spot as a lime kiln, which is almost certainly accurate. By the 1904 edition, the feature had disappeared from the map altogether, and the 1937 revision appears to have reintroduced it under a different interpretation. In 1934, a researcher named Bowman visited the land, then owned by a man called Daniel Ryan, and recorded something the maps had missed entirely: a church site and a burial ground. The church itself had already vanished, but Bowman noted five headstones projecting about six inches above the ground, marking the positions of graves. When the site was later revisited, the then-current landowner had no knowledge of any burial ground on the land, though he confirmed that Daniel Ryan had indeed been a previous owner. The field name, the kiln, the lost church, and the barely-visible graves have become layered over one another on this commanding hilltop, each piece of evidence pointing in a slightly different direction.