Burial, Foyoges, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Burial Sites
About thirty metres north-east of Foyoges graveyard in County Sligo, a small oval patch of ground measuring roughly ten metres east to west and five metres wide carries the name "Bishop's Grave" on the 1914 Ordnance Survey six-inch map.
There is nothing to see there now. No headstone, no mound, no trace of whoever the bishop in question may have been. The designation exists on paper, and the ground keeps its own counsel.
What makes the spot quietly compelling is what has gathered around its absence. A stone bench encircling a tree at the location holds a collection of praying stones, small smooth stones moved or placed deliberately as part of a devotional practice, of a kind associated across Ireland with holy wells and pattern sites where people marked prayer through physical gesture and repetition. Alongside these, a portion of an eighteenth-century table-tomb or chest-tomb, a raised rectangular grave monument of the kind common to that period, has also been noted at the site. The combination suggests that whatever formal memory of the burial may have faded, some form of veneration continued at the spot long after the grave itself became invisible.