Burial ground, Kilmoremoy, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Kilmoremoy, Co. Mayo

Within this walled burial ground on a north-south ridge near Ballina, a road drives straight into the graveyard itself, running the full length of the southern wall as though the dead required a thoroughfare.

It is an odd domestic detail in a place that turns out to hold considerably older and stranger things than the formal 18th and 19th-century headstones that make up most of its visible population.

The site has shifted identity more than once. The first Ordnance Survey mapping, from 1837, marks a roughly square area of around 30 metres across in what was then Ardoughan townland, but does not name it as a burial ground at all. By the 1930 edition, the enclosure had grown dramatically, to a subrectangular walled space of roughly 110 by 145 metres, and was labelled League Cemetery; the townland boundary had also been redrawn, placing it within Kilmoremoy. That growth from unnamed square to named, substantially larger enclosure over less than a century suggests the site absorbed, rather than replaced, something earlier. The oldest layer sits at the highest point in the south-west quadrant, where a circular enclosure occupies ground that corresponds roughly to that first, small, dashed outline on the 1837 map. Associated with it are two notable objects: a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions that are characteristic of early Christian and prehistoric sacred sites in Ireland, and a cross-inscribed stone. A medieval church lies 50 metres to the east, enclosed within the adjoining Kilmoremoy graveyard.

The burial ground is accessible from the Ballina to Killala road, with the entrance on the eastern side. Visitors should be prepared for uneven ground; the ridge slope produces a series of terraces and tilted sections, with some graves sitting level and others at odd angles to one another. Yew trees are scattered across the interior, long grass and overgrowth cover much of the space, and the north-west corner has been taken over entirely by dense scrub. The circular enclosure and its associated stones, set at the highest point of the site, repay a careful look once found.

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