Ballynakill Grave Yard, Ballynakill, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Ballynakill Grave Yard, Ballynakill, Co. Galway

In the grassland at Ballynakill, a small rectangular patch of ground holds the dead without so much as a wall to mark its boundary.

The burial ground is unenclosed, meaning there is no surrounding ditch, bank, or masonry to announce its presence, only the land itself and the dense tree copse that has grown up over it. A faint rise in the ground is the most reliable sign that something lies beneath.

The site was recorded on the 1945 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, which gives its approximate dimensions as roughly twenty metres on the northeast-southwest axis and fifteen metres on the northwest-southeast. When surveyors examined it, they found only a single grave-marker, a modest stone roughly half a metre in height and half a metre in width, positioned just northwest of centre. Scattered throughout the area were small stones that appeared to be field-clearance material rather than deliberate memorials, the kind of stones a farmer would have moved to the margins of a field rather than anything placed in remembrance. Unenclosed burial grounds of this type are found across Ireland and often mark the graves of unbaptised children or those who, for various reasons, were not buried in consecrated ground. The absence of a surrounding structure and the near-total lack of grave-markers gives such places a quality of deliberate forgetting, or perhaps simply of time doing what it does.

The site is heavily overgrown, and the tree canopy makes it difficult to read the ground clearly. The faint earthen rise is the most visible indicator of the burial area, though the scatter of small stones throughout may also help orient a careful visitor.

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