Grave Yard, Templemartin, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Templemartin, Co. Galway

The graveyard at Templemartin presents a particular kind of puzzle: it appears clearly on a map made in 1838, labelled across two fields to the north of the church, and yet nobody seems able to say with any confidence where the burials actually were.

No grave-markers have been found, and the label on the Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet gives no precise indication of location, only a name hanging over the landscape like a half-remembered fact.

Local knowledge complicates the cartographic picture further. Oral tradition places the graveyard not to the north at all, but to the south and south-west of Templemartin Church, which itself sits in scrubland overlooking a turlough to the north. A turlough is a seasonally flooding lake, common in the limestone karst country of Connacht, its edges shifting with the water table across the year. The only physical marker associated with the burial ground is a single natural slab of stone, lying roughly six metres to the south of the church, believed locally to cover the grave of a priest. No cut or inscribed headstones have been recorded in the area, and the fields mapped in 1838 had become densely overgrown by the time the site was examined on the ground.

Since then, the land to the south of the church has changed again. Recent aerial imagery shows that a large shed has been constructed in the area where local tradition placed the burials. Whatever arrangement of graves, if any, lay beneath that ground is now considerably harder to read from the surface.

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