Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Mayo

Among the headstones and grave slabs of this small Mayo burial ground, certain markers stand out not for their inscriptions but for the absence of them.

Low, upright stones, unlettered and unadorned, are scattered through the grass alongside the dateable monuments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether these uninscribed stones predate the surrounding material by decades or centuries is not recorded, but their presence gives the graveyard an unresolved quality, a sense that some of its dead were commemorated in a manner that predates the convention of naming the dead in cut stone.

The graveyard sits on a gentle north-to-south rise above damp pasture on the north-eastern shore of Lough Conn, with the lake itself lying roughly 120 metres to the west. The site is roughly square, measuring somewhere between 35 and 45 metres across in each direction, and enclosed by a mortared stone wall. A road runs along its western side, and there are two points of entry in that wall: a gated entrance with stone-built piers near the southern end, and a stone-built stile further north. The southern wall of the enclosure also serves as the boundary of the townland of Glebe. At the northern end stands a church, its north wall shared with the north wall of the graveyard itself, the two structures integrated in a way that suggests a long and intertwined history on this particular patch of ground.

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Pete F
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