Burying Ground, Woodford, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In the deciduous woodland north-north-west of Woodford village, there is a patch of ground where strangers were buried.
Not parishioners, not locals with names entered in any register, but strangers, people passing through or found without community, laid to rest in a place that was itself set apart. The burial ground sits, or sat, in the southern end of a wood historically known on maps as Bullseye Wood, an unenclosed rectangle of roughly twenty metres east to west and fifteen metres north to south, reached by a pathway from the north-east. Unenclosed is the telling word here. Most Irish burial grounds of any formal standing were walled or ditched; the absence of any such boundary signals that this place occupied a category of its own, somewhere between consecrated ground and the open earth.
The site appears on both the 1838 and 1920 editions of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which suggests it was recognised and named across at least two generations, even if its use had likely ceased long before the later survey. A note in the OS Letters, compiled by O'Flanagan in 1927, records the tradition plainly: it was a burying place for strangers. The graves themselves were marked not with cut stone but with rough, undressed limestone boulders, the kind of informal field material that leaves little impression on the landscape. When the site was inspected in June 1983, the woodland had reclaimed it almost entirely, with bramble and encroaching trees obscuring everything except a few scattered boulders. A return visit in August 1985 added one further, quietly melancholy detail: the landowner recalled that the grave markers had been gathered up and consolidated into a clearance cairn, the stones repurposed or simply tidied away. Apart from a handful of scattered remnants, no visible surface trace of the burial ground now survives.