The Famine Plot at Templecurraheen
A traditional unmarked burial ground inside the old graveyard wall.
Walk into the old graveyard at Templecurraheen and stand near the ruined medieval church. If you look toward the back, you will see a distinct shift in the ground — a large, irregular mound, set apart from the surrounding headstones, with no names, dates, or markers. Local tradition holds that beneath it lie the bones of famine victims from the parish.
The mound is inside the graveyard wall, raised and vegetated, bare of headstones while the marked stones around it crowd up close but do not encroach. The church ruin rises directly behind it. No register known to me lists who is buried there, and no inscription marks the ground. The identification rests on what has been passed down in the parish.
It is easy to walk past the mound without noticing it. But once you know it is there, the small patch of ground holds what the inscriptions around it cannot.