Burial ground, Killissane, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Killissane, Co. Cork

In a field in Killissane, North Cork, the dead lie beneath ordinary pasture with nothing to mark their presence.

No headstones, no enclosure wall, no hollow in the ground; the site is entirely invisible to anyone who does not already know to look. What survives is only a name, passed between generations, and the memory of two gates that once stood on either side of the road and were known locally as the graveyard gates.

The word "cill" in Irish place-name tradition refers to an early ecclesiastical enclosure or small church site, often associated with burial from the early Christian period onwards. Writing in 1932, the scholar Power recorded this cill as lying to the north side of the public road, in a large field near its south-east angle, on land then belonging to a John Moynihan. That brief notation is now among the few surviving anchors for a site that has otherwise slipped entirely below the surface of the landscape. The gates Power or his contemporaries might have seen are gone too, and the pasture has long since closed over whatever once gave the place its function and its local reputation.

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Pete F
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