Graveyard, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Oldcourt, Co. Cork

Along the northern shoulder of the Awbeg River glen in County Cork, there is a graveyard that has been quietly accumulating layers of misidentification, forgotten chapels, and centuries of burials.

The most curious detail concerns a low rectangular enclosure near the southern boundary, roughly 22 metres east to west, which contains a chest tomb belonging to a Reverend Cotter who died in 1784. On the 1937 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, this enclosure was marked as the remains of a church, a mistake that mapped the wrong thing into the official record and presumably went unchallenged for some time.

The graveyard itself is subrectangular in shape, with a triangular extension to the west and a more recent addition to the southwest, suggesting gradual growth over at least three centuries. At its core was a chapel-of-ease, a secondary place of worship built to serve people who lived too far from a parish church, associated with the townlands of Oldcourt and Rossdock. By 1615 it was already recorded as being in ruin. The older section of the graveyard is packed with graves, and while the oldest legible headstones visible in recent times were dated 1797 and 1799, earlier research noted stones from 1726, 1758, and several others from the mid to late eighteenth century, suggesting the ground had been in use long before those dates and that some of its older markers have simply become illegible with time.

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Pete F
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