Graveyard, Foyoges, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Foyoges, Co. Sligo

A small graveyard in County Sligo that still receives the dead is unusual enough, but what sets Foyoges apart is its recorded purpose.

In 1836, the Ordnance Survey Letters noted it as a burial ground for children and strangers, then known as Killamy. That designation places it in a tradition found in scattered pockets across Ireland, where those excluded from consecrated ground, unbaptised infants most commonly, along with travellers and others who died without clear parish affiliation, were interred in older, liminal spaces. The name Killamy likely derives from the Irish, suggesting an early ecclesiastical origin, and the site carries the quiet physical evidence of that long use.

The enclosure is modest, a rectangle roughly twenty metres by fourteen, bounded by a stone wall about a metre high, with a piered entrance gate set into the centre of the north-east wall. The ground slopes gently downward from that entrance. In the western half, traces of a church survive beneath the surface, and two small, well-shaped grave-markers, each around thirty centimetres high and inscribed with plain incised crosses, stand among a scatter of uninscribed low stones. Five twentieth-century headstones indicate that the site is still in use as a burial ground today. Around twenty metres to the north-west lies a souterrain, an underground stone-lined passage typically associated with early medieval settlement, which points to a much older human presence in this immediate landscape. A further curiosity appears on the 1914 Ordnance Survey six-inch map: a feature marked as the Bishop's Grave, roughly thirty metres to the north-east. No visible remains of it survive, but praying stones have been recorded at that location, suggesting that some memory of its significance persisted in local practice even after the physical monument itself disappeared.

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