Burial, Dooghmakeon, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Sites
In the townland of Dooghmakeon, in County Mayo, there is a recorded burial site.
That is very nearly all that can be said with confidence. The monument exists in the archaeological record, it has been assigned a classification, and the townland that holds it carries a name derived from the Irish, but the details that would give it texture, including its age, its form, and any history of excavation or discovery, remain effectively inaccessible through public channels.
Dooghmakeon is a small rural townland in Mayo, a county that contains an extraordinary density of prehistoric and early medieval remains, from megalithic court tombs and passage graves to early Christian enclosures and souterrains, underground stone-lined passages typically associated with settlement sites of the early medieval period. A burial designation in this landscape could refer to almost anything across a very wide span of time: a Bronze Age cist, in which a body was placed in a small stone-lined box set into the ground; an early Christian grave marked by a slab; or a site known only from local memory or an antiquarian note made centuries ago. Without further detail, the site sits somewhere in that long continuum, noted but not yet narrated.