Burial ground, Carrowmore, Co. Sligo
Co. Sligo |
Burial Grounds
On the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, this site in County Sligo carries an unusually candid label: "Caltragh (A Pagan Cemetery)".
That designation alone sets it apart from the more diplomatically named early burial grounds scattered across Ireland, and the ground itself has a quietly unresolved quality that the label only hints at. No church ever stood here, and no local tradition connects it to Christian burial. It sits in rolling pasture, a subcircular raised area roughly 71 metres north to south and 69 metres east to west, its edges shaped by a bank with crude stone facing at the north-west and a wide external fosse, a defensive or enclosing ditch, still visible to the east.
When the antiquarian George Petrie visited and recorded the site in 1837, he noted that it had originally been surrounded by a circle of large stones, most of which had been removed during land clearance, with those remaining nearly buried under accumulated earth. His account is spare but striking: the whole of it, he wrote, was filled with bones. No interment had taken place within living memory, and no one he spoke to had any tradition of a church on the spot. That absence of ecclesiastical association is significant. A caltragh, in Irish usage, typically refers to a pre-Christian burial ground, a place set aside for those who died outside the structures of the later Church, and this site appears to fit that category precisely. The enclosure's layout has since become clearer through survey. An external stone wall encloses the site, running close to the west and north before extending outward to the south, where an earth and stone bank continues its line to the east, forming a heart-shaped outer enclosure. A causeway with ruined stone walls on either side marks the entrance from the east. Within the interior, a stone wall in the southern end once defined a smaller D-shaped area, roughly 13 metres by 16 metres, whose purpose remains unclear. Aerial photographs suggested the possible presence of hut sites nearby, but no trace of these has been found on the ground.