Grave Yard, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

A graveyard inside a rath is already an unusual combination, but what makes this site at Carrowmore in County Galway particularly arresting is the layering of it: the dead were buried within a structure that was itself a statement of territorial occupation, and somewhere just a few metres away, a souterrain runs beneath the ground.

Three different ways of claiming or inhabiting a landscape, folded into one small corner of south Galway.

The rath, sometimes called a ringfort, was a circular earthwork enclosure typical of early medieval Ireland, used primarily as a farmstead and a marker of status. The graveyard occupies the interior of just such an enclosure, and the graves themselves, indicated by set stones, are aligned on a northeast-to-southwest axis across an unenclosed trapezoidal area measuring roughly 17 metres by 12 metres. The northeast-southwest orientation is a recognised variation on the more common east-west Christian alignment, and its presence here may point to an early or transitional period of burial practice. The souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage associated with storage or refuge and commonly found near ringforts, lies approximately five metres to the northwest of the graveyard area. O'Flanagan noted the site in 1927, recording it in the first volume of what appears to have been a survey of local antiquities, and it is from that reference that much of what can be said about the graves derives.

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