Graveyard, Inishtemple Island, Co. Leitrim

Inishtemple island carries the suggestion of a burial ground in historical record, yet the ground itself declines to confirm it. No disturbed earth, no enclosing wall or ditch, no visible markers correspond to the site described.

The Ordnance Survey Name Books, compiled in the nineteenth century as part of a sweeping effort to document placenames and local landmarks across Ireland, note the presence of an old burying ground on Inishtemple. These volumes were assembled by teams of surveyors who recorded what local informants told them alongside what they could observe directly, meaning that entries sometimes preserved memory of a place rather than physical evidence of it. In this case, the Name Books gesture towards a graveyard near the island's church, a structure recorded separately in the archaeological register. But a subsequent examination found nothing in the immediate vicinity of that church to support the claim: no earthwork enclosure of the kind that typically surrounds an early ecclesiastical burial ground, and no surface indication of graves.