Burial ground, Inishturk, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
At the northern tip of Inishturk, a small island off the Galway coast, a rectangular graveyard sits above a beach known as Caibidil.
The ground is disused now, enclosed within a modern wall that replaced whatever boundary once marked it off from the surrounding land. It is a quietly anomalous thing, a place set aside for the dead in a location that feels more exposed than sheltered, the sea close enough to be audible from the graveside.
Very little has been formally recorded about this burial ground. What is known comes from information supplied by Tim Robinson, the writer and cartographer who mapped the islands and coastline of Connacht in extraordinary detail during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Robinson's fieldwork across Connemara and the Aran Islands produced maps and prose of unusual precision, and his local knowledge fills gaps that formal survey methods sometimes cannot reach. In this case, the site itself was not directly inspected by surveyors, so Robinson's account remains the primary thread of detail. The name Caibidil attached to the beach below is worth pausing on; it derives from the Irish word for chapter, possibly suggesting an ecclesiastical connection, though no formal link to a church or monastic site is recorded here.