Grave Yard, Bunmore, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Bunmore, Co. Mayo

In a glen on the south-western slopes of mountainous Bunmore in County Mayo, a graveyard has effectively ceased to exist.

Not destroyed, not cleared, simply gone from view, absorbed back into the pasture that surrounds it. By 1996, an on-site inspection could find no visible trace of the enclosure, the graves, or the church that had once occupied its western corner.

Ordnance Survey maps from 1838 and 1920 both mark the site clearly as a rectangular enclosed area, roughly thirty metres across, with a small church known as Temple Eunna built into the western corner of the boundary wall. The dedication to a figure named Eunna connects this place to an older devotional landscape: roughly a hundred metres to the south-west lies Tober Eunna, a holy well bearing the same name. Holy wells in Ireland were typically sites of local veneration, often associated with an early Christian saint or a now-obscure local figure, and the pairing of a named well with a named church suggests this glen once held some significance in the religious life of the surrounding community. Between the 1838 and 1920 map editions the recorded shape of the enclosure shifted slightly, from something close to square to a more pronounced rectangle measuring around thirty metres on its longer axis, which may reflect changes on the ground or simply differences in surveying. By the 1940s, an unpublished Irish Tourism Survey noted the presence of a small cross-inscribed graveslab within the enclosure, rough in workmanship but legible enough to record. Within half a century, even that had disappeared along with everything else.

The stream immediately to the east of the site is likely still there. The well to the south-west may be findable for those who know what to look for. The graveyard itself offers nothing visible, which is, in its own way, the most striking thing about it.

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