Toberderagon Grave Yard, Bullaunagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In a patch of Galway pastureland, a quiet arrangement of grassed-over stones marks what was once a place of burial.
The site is easy to miss: no walls, no gate, no signage. What defines it on one side is a low earthen bank, and on the others, a loose boundary of trees, enclosing a subrectangular space roughly thirteen metres by twelve. Inside, the stones lie in the turf like half-forgotten punctuation, their arrangement indicating graves without announcing them.
The name offers the most intriguing detail here. Toberderagon almost certainly derives from the Irish tobar, meaning a well, combined with a personal name, suggesting this ground was once associated with a holy well, likely dedicated to a saint whose name has been worn down to something close to "Deragon" or "Dragon" over centuries of oral use. Holy wells and their adjacent burial grounds were a common pairing in early Christian Ireland, the well serving as a focus for pattern days, healing rituals, and local devotion, while the surrounding ground became a place to inter the dead outside of formal parish structures. Such informal graveyards, sometimes called cilliní or children's burial grounds, or in other cases simply local community plots predating or running parallel to the parish system, survive in considerable numbers across Connacht, though many are as understated as this one. Whether this site functioned as a cillín specifically, or as a broader community burial ground, the notes do not say.