Burial, Clooncah, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Sites
In the pastureland of Clooncah, on a north-west-facing slope in County Galway, there is a burial.
That much is known. What is not known is almost everything else: who lies there, when they were interred, or under what circumstances. No mound, no marker, no surface trace of any kind survives to indicate the spot. The only evidence that anything was ever recorded here comes from a single cartographic source, the third edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1930, which marked the site and has since been the sole reason it remains in the archaeological record at all.
The OS six-inch maps, produced across several editions from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, were extraordinarily thorough documents, often capturing features that have since vanished entirely from the landscape. That this burial appears only on the 1930 edition and not on earlier surveys suggests it may have been identified or reported in the intervening decades, though the circumstances of that recording are not known. What gives the site an additional layer of quiet significance is its proximity to a battlefield. Approximately 400 metres to the south-east lies a recorded battlefield site, designated GA007-042 in the archaeological inventory for County Galway. The spatial relationship between the two features is suggestive, though no direct connection between them has been established.