Kilcormick Burial Ground, Carrowgarve, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Kilcormick Burial Ground, Carrowgarve, Co. Mayo

A low, subtriangular patch of raised ground beside Lough Conn holds a burial place that maps and tradition have recorded quite differently over the years.

The stones here are small, uninscribed, and upright, and the graves they mark are in some cases tiny, suggesting that this was, at least in part, a place set aside for children. That designation connects it to a tradition once widespread across Ireland: the cillín, an unconsecrated or marginally consecrated ground where unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal church burial could be interred. The silence around such sites was never only geographical.

The ground sits on a south-east facing slope, roughly thirty metres from a small inlet on the south-eastern shore of Lough Conn in County Mayo. By the time the Ordnance Survey published its six-inch map in 1838, the place was already recorded as 'Kilcormac Grave Yard', a name rooted in the Irish cill, meaning a church or ecclesiastical cell, and a personal name, Cormac. The 1922 edition rendered it 'Killeencormack Burial Gd.', the diminutive form hinting at a small or subsidiary foundation. Aldridge, writing in 1969, listed it specifically as a children's burial ground, and the presence of a number of very small stone-lined graves supports that reading. The area is enclosed partly by a low, poorly defined scarp curving from south-south-west to north, and partly by field boundary walls to the east and south. There are also indications that a church once stood here, which would make this one of those early ecclesiastical sites whose above-ground traces have gradually dissolved into fieldscape.

Built into the field boundary wall on the eastern side is a bullaun stone, a boulder or slab with one or more artificial cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface. Bullaun stones are associated with early Christian and pre-Christian activity across Ireland, and their presence at a site often signals long continuity of use. That this one has been incorporated into a later field wall is typical; such stones were too substantial to remove easily, and perhaps too significant to discard.

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