Graveyard, Dollas Upper, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that appears on one map and vanishes from the next is already an unusual thing, but the burial ground at Dollas Upper in County Limerick goes further than that.
It barely exists on the ground at all. Annotated as 'Dollas Grave Yard (Disused)' on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, it is shown only in dotted outline, the cartographic convention for something uncertain or already fading from use. By the time the twenty-five-inch OS revision came around, it had disappeared from the record entirely.
The six-inch Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland were produced in the 1830s and remain one of the most detailed snapshots of the pre-Famine landscape ever compiled. The fact that this graveyard does not appear on the first edition of that series, yet does appear on a later edition marked as disused, suggests it had already fallen out of active use by the mid-nineteenth century, and may have been in decline even before the surveyors first passed through. Archaeological records compiled by Caimin O'Brien note that the site may also have been the location of Dollas Church, recorded separately under the reference LI030-122. The association of a graveyard with a lost church is a familiar pattern across the Irish countryside, where early medieval or post-medieval parishes shrank, merged, or were simply abandoned, leaving a scatter of undocumented burial ground behind.
Today, the outline of the rectangular enclosure, the typical shape of an early Irish ecclesiastical site, is barely legible even from the air. Digital Globe aerial photography reveals only the faintest trace of its perimeter in the field. On the ground, a visitor would need to know roughly where to look, and even then there is little to see beyond a subtle change in vegetation or a slight rise in the earth. That quality of near-invisibility is itself part of what makes the site worth knowing about. It sits in a landscape that has absorbed it almost completely, surviving for now as a dotted line on an old map and a rectangle of shadow on a satellite image.