It is the place that inspired one of the most celebrated pieces of prose in the English language, and yet the graveyard itself remains quietly understated, its significance easy to miss without knowing what to look for.

The cemetery is closely associated with Michael Bodkin, a young man from Galway who died in 1900 and was buried at Rahoon. He had been a suitor of Nora Barnacle before she left Ireland and eventually became the wife of James Joyce. Years later, Joyce transformed Bodkin into the character of Michael Furey in his short story "The Dead", the final and most admired piece in the 1914 collection "Dubliners". In the story, the dead young man becomes a figure of overwhelming romantic intensity, remembered by the character Gretta Conroy as someone who had loved her with a passion that her living husband could never quite match. The closing paragraphs of "The Dead", in which snow falls "faintly through the universe" and upon "all the living and the dead", are among the most quoted in Irish literature. The real grave at Rahoon, then, sits at the origin point of all of that.