Graves, Aughrus Beg, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Sites

Graves, Aughrus Beg, Co. Galway

On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of Connemara, a small circular area roughly eight metres across is marked near the eastern end of Aughrusbeg Lough, just north of a minor stream.

It is labelled as graves. Nothing remains to be seen on the ground today, no earthwork, no kerbing, no depression in the turf, only the cartographic record of something that once warranted recording.

The site sits in Aughrus Beg, a quietly remote stretch of west Galway on the Aughrus Peninsula, south of Clifden. The six-inch Ordnance Survey maps, produced during the mid-nineteenth century, were remarkable documents of their kind, capturing field boundaries, raths, standing stones, and burial places at a moment before many such features were lost to agricultural change, turf-cutting, or simple neglect. That the surveyors noted an unenclosed circular area here, distinct from the surrounding landscape, suggests it was either still faintly legible in their time or was pointed out to them by local knowledge. Unenclosed burial grounds of this kind in the west of Ireland often represent early medieval or post-medieval informal cemeteries, sometimes associated with unbaptised children, known in Irish tradition as cillíní, though no such specific identification is attached to this particular site.

What is left, then, is essentially a place defined by its absence. The lough is real, the stream is real, the coordinates can be followed. But the thing that earned the map notation has dissolved back into the land, leaving only a name and a diameter.

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Pete F
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