Burial ground, Mountbridget, Co. Cork
Co. Cork |
Burial Grounds
In a pasture at Mountbridget in north Cork, a low circular scarp in the ground is just about all that remains of a place that once had two names and, it seems, a deliberate effort made to forget it.
It is known locally as a children's burial ground, a term that points to the tradition of burying unbaptised infants in unconsecrated ground, apart from the main parish cemetery. These sites, found across Ireland, occupy a quietly ambiguous place in local memory, neither fully acknowledged nor entirely lost.
The site appears on the 1842 Ordnance Survey six-inch map as an oval area labelled "Templenakilla", a name suggesting a small early church or ecclesiastical enclosure. By the 1905 edition it had vanished from the map altogether, only to reappear in the 1937 survey as a circular area called "Paircín na Cille", an Irish phrase meaning roughly "the little field of the church". That shift in name, and the gap in cartographic record, hints at how the site was understood and treated across different generations. On the ground today, the enclosure measures roughly 34.5 metres in diameter, defined by a slight scarp rising to no more than 0.65 metres at its highest. At the centre sits a low mound of earth and stone about 8.6 metres across, with a single boulder still resting on top. Local knowledge holds that other boulders, once scattered across the interior, were broken up and removed within living memory, so what survives is already a reduced version of what was once there.
The site sits in open pasture and is largely levelled, which means there is relatively little to see without knowing what to look for. The faint curve of the scarp is easiest to read from the southeast or northwest, where it is most pronounced. The remaining central mound and its boulder are the clearest surviving features, and they repay a slow circuit rather than a glance from the field edge.