Burial ground, Lavally, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Lavally, Co. Galway

Just outside the town of Gort in County Galway, a quiet rectangular plot of pastureland carries one of those local names that tells you almost everything you need to know before you even step inside.

It was called Bully's Acre, a term used in Ireland for paupers' burial grounds, and the people interred here were among the most invisible of the Famine dead: those who had made it as far as the workhouse but no further.

The burial ground sits on a gentle south-east-facing incline, roughly 62 metres along its long axis and 31 metres across. An Ordnance Survey plan from the 1912 to 1916 survey shows it occupying the south-western end of a large field, with boundary walls still standing along the southern and western sides. The walls that once enclosed the northern and eastern edges appear to have been levelled at some point, leaving those limits open to the field beyond. The workhouse from which the dead were brought lies approximately 630 metres to the south-south-west, on the outskirts of Gort. That proximity was practical rather than incidental; workhouse burial grounds were typically established close to the institution, and the scale of Famine mortality meant that existing churchyards were often overwhelmed. Numerous small headstones mark the graves, and three more recent stones are visible near the western gateway, the earliest of these dating to 1905, suggesting the ground continued in use well after the Famine years. Four trenches are also visible across the site, three running roughly parallel to the long axis and a fourth along the northern edge, the kind of features consistent with mass burial of the kind that Famine workhouses required.

The site is accessible via a gateway on the western side, and the roadside walls along the south and west give it a degree of definition in the landscape, though its quietness and pastoral setting mean it asks something of a visitor willing to look carefully rather than immediately. The small headstones, scattered and worn, are worth pausing over.

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Pete F
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