Burial, Grange, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Sites

Burial, Grange, Co. Galway

In a working farmyard in Grange, County Galway, people were buried during the Famine, and today there is nothing at ground level to mark the fact.

No stone, no mound, no fence line sets the place apart from the surrounding pasture. The dead are simply there, beneath ordinary agricultural land, in a spot that has long since been folded back into everyday use.

Local tradition holds that the burial ground was associated with a soup kitchen and an orphanage located close by, which together sketch a particular kind of Famine landscape: relief infrastructure, the desperate and the orphaned, and the dead accumulating nearby. Soup kitchens were established across Ireland during the late 1840s under a patchwork of public and charitable schemes, and orphanages, often run by religious orders, absorbed children left without families by starvation and disease. That all three elements, the kitchen, the orphanage, and the burial ground, appear to have existed within close proximity of one another at Grange suggests a site of some local significance during the worst years of the crisis, even if no formal commemoration has ever marked it. The burial ground itself carries no visible surface trace, meaning it survives, if it survives at all, entirely below the soil.

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