Grave Yard, Páirc An Teampaill Íochtarach, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Páirc An Teampaill Íochtarach, Co. Mayo

On the western shore of Lough Mask in County Mayo, a graveyard sits within walls that have quietly shifted shape over the decades.

Compare the 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map with the 1929 edition and you will notice that what was once a trapezoidal enclosure, broader at the north end and narrower to the south, had by the twentieth century become a larger rectangle, its southern wall removed and the burial ground extended outward. That kind of incremental expansion is common enough in Irish graveyards, but what makes this one worth pausing over is what happened inside it during a tidying campaign in the latter half of the twentieth century.

At some point during that period, the graveyard underwent what might charitably be called a clean-up. The traditional uninscribed stone gravemarkers, the kind of low fieldstone that once quietly identified a burial without any formal inscription, were largely cleared away and replaced with rows of plain concrete crosses arranged in neat north-to-south lines. A handful of the original stone markers survive near the site of the associated church in the northern half of the enclosure, and their presence makes the replacement all the more legible. What was once an organic, uneven landscape of local stone has been regularised into something more orderly and far less historically telling. The three standing walls, built in stone with stone and mortar coping, remain intact, as do scattered nineteenth and twentieth-century headstones and occasional graveslabs. One further object of note is a bullaun stone within the graveyard. Bullauns are boulder or bedrock stones with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into them; they appear frequently at early ecclesiastical sites across Ireland and their exact function remains debated, with suggestions ranging from liturgical use to association with cursing or healing traditions.

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