Burial Ground, Belmont, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On the hilltop at Belmont in County Galway, a burial ground occupies the interior of an ancient hillfort, layering the dead of the nineteenth century over a structure whose origins reach back far earlier.
The fort itself is a roughly oval enclosure, running about forty metres east to west and thirty-five metres north to south, defined by a stone wall with a narrow entrance on its eastern side. The ground inside rises steeply to a flat summit, where a solitary tree stands beside two inscribed graveslabs. One of those slabs commemorates a George Blake, dated 1840.
The site carries an additional layer of cartographic strangeness. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, shows two distinct enclosures within the hillfort: the larger oval on the summit, and a small circular feature of roughly ten metres diameter in the south-eastern quadrant, the latter labelled specifically as 'Burial Ground'. By the third edition of 1916, that smaller enclosure has vanished from the map entirely, with the label transferred to the larger oval. No surface trace of the circular enclosure survives today. Whether it was destroyed, absorbed, or simply never well-defined enough to survive observation is unclear. What the early map captured, the later one quietly erased.
Beyond the inscribed slabs, a number of rough stone grave-markers are still visible across the interior, including what appear to be two children's graves in the north-western quadrant. The combination of a prehistoric hillfort, a lost enclosure recorded only on early maps, and a nineteenth-century burial ground that seems to have gradually claimed the entire hilltop makes this a quietly layered place, where the administrative tidiness of cartography sits uneasily against the messier reality on the ground.