Saint Feighin's Grave Yard, Lackan, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On a low hillock in County Galway farmland, a small graveyard sits enclosed by a drystone wall barely a metre high.
The ground inside is uneven and grassed over, with the buried slabs beneath the turf creating a rolling, unpredictable surface underfoot. Of all the graves that must once have been marked here, only one headstone remains visible, a polished marble stone dated 1915. The rest have been quietly swallowed by the field.
The enclosure itself measures roughly 38 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, and its subcircular shape is significant. In Irish ecclesiastical archaeology, a circular or near-circular enclosing boundary is generally associated with early medieval foundation, when the curved boundary was a common feature of monastic and devotional sites. The dedication to Saint Feighin strengthens that sense of age. A holy well bearing the same name lies approximately 30 metres to the north-east, a proximity that is typical of early Irish sacred landscapes, where well and burial ground often formed part of the same devotional complex. Holy wells in Ireland were frequently associated with a named saint and used for ritual purposes stretching back well before the formal structures of medieval Christianity.
The site remains in active, if occasional, use. Mass is celebrated here each July, and in 2017 a set of outdoor Stations of the Cross was erected around the perimeter. Access to the enclosure is through a gateway on the west-south-west side. Visitors should expect the interior to be genuinely rough underfoot, the grass concealing the edges and surfaces of buried grave-markers throughout.