Burial, Carrowmore, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Sites
Tucked into the south-western quadrant of an earthen ringfort in Carrowmore, County Mayo, there is a grave that seems to have simply appeared between one map survey and the next.
The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch sheet records nothing at this spot, yet by 1915 the same cartographers marked it plainly as a grave. Whatever was placed here, it arrived, or was acknowledged, sometime in that long intervening stretch.
The grave is rectangular, measuring roughly 4.5 metres along its north-west to south-east axis and 3.55 metres across, and it sits close to the inner edge of the rath's enclosing bank. A rath, to use the older term, is a roughly circular earthwork enclosure, typically of early medieval Irish origin, defined by one or more raised banks and ditches. The grave's perimeter is neatly formed by a low dry-stone limestone wall, well built despite its modest dimensions, standing only about 0.2 metres high and 0.6 metres wide. The surface within is scattered with loose stone, giving it a quiet, unfinished quality, as though the marking of the ground mattered more than any permanent monument above it. The choice to inter someone inside an older enclosure was not unusual in rural Ireland; raths accumulated layers of meaning over centuries, and the ground they enclosed was often regarded as set apart, neither wholly secular nor formally consecrated.