Burial Ground, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Carrowmore, Co. Galway

At Carrowmore in County Galway, a small burial ground occupies one of the more quietly layered spots in the Irish rural landscape: it sits inside a rath, an earthwork enclosure of the kind typically associated with early medieval settlement rather than the dead.

That combination, a burial space nested within what was once a farmstead boundary or place of habitation, gives the site an unusual character, as though two quite different uses of the land have quietly merged over the centuries.

The burial ground itself is modest in scale. A rectangular area, roughly nine and a half metres long and six metres wide, is defined by a series of set stones, and within that boundary a number of slabs mark the graves, some upright, some recumbent. The detail was recorded by McCaffrey in 1952, and the sparse nature of that record reflects how little fuss was made of such places even when they were being formally noted. The rath that contains it is a separate, older feature, the sort of ringfort earthwork that dots the Irish countryside and dates in most cases to the early medieval period, roughly the sixth to tenth centuries. How the burial ground came to occupy its interior is not recorded.

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