Burial, Gannoughs, Co. Galway

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Burial Sites

Burial, Gannoughs, Co. Galway

Just above the high-water mark on the shore to the south-west of An Trá Mhór, the sea has been slowly undoing whatever burial ground once occupied this strip of Galway coastline.

What remains are two rectangular hummocks in the sand, each roughly six metres long, one and a half metres wide, and just over half a metre high, oriented east to west in the manner of Christian graves. Around them, human bones have been visible in the surrounding sand, exposed by erosion and left with no context to explain them.

The site has had a somewhat tangled administrative life as well as a physical one. It was mistakenly classified in the Sites and Monuments Record for County Galway as a cillin burial ground, a type of unconsecrated plot historically used for the interment of unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground, though this classification was later corrected on the authority of T. Robinson. What the burials actually represent, whether early Christian, medieval, or later, is not recorded. The two surviving hummocks are likely all that coastal erosion has left of a larger burial area, the rest gradually surrendered to the Atlantic over an unknown period of time.

The bones visible in the sand around the hummocks make this an unusual and quietly sobering place to encounter, less a monument than a remnant, its edges literally dissolving into the shoreline with each tide.

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Pete F
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