Burial Ground, Newtown, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
In the pastureland and scrubland of Newtown, Co. Galway, a graveyard has been swallowed almost entirely by thorn trees and briars.
The site is irregularly shaped, roughly 61 metres along its northwest to southeast axis and around 33 metres across, and it presses close against the eastern and northern walls of a ruined chapel. What makes it quietly unsettling is not its age or its obscurity but a single detail carried in its name: the adjoining chapel appears on Ordnance Survey maps as Calluragh Chapel, and a calluragh, or cillín as it is sometimes known, was a burial ground set apart from consecrated ground, traditionally used for the interment of unbaptised infants. These sites existed across Ireland in considerable numbers, occupying liminal spaces, field corners, old ringforts, and coastal margins, because Catholic teaching long held that children who died before baptism could not be buried in hallowed ground. The weight of that exclusion is present in the very landscape here.
The 1920 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records the site clearly, showing the graveyard's irregular outline beside the chapel. By the time surveyors examined it in more recent years, the interior had become almost impenetrable. In the northern sector, some graveslabs were recorded, each around 1.1 metres long and 0.5 metres wide. A number of headstones were also noted, some upright and some collapsed, most of them roughly hewn from local stone. One small stone stood apart: measuring just 36 centimetres high and 34 centimetres wide, it was inscribed with the letters I and H, separated by a small Latin cross. That monogram, IH, is a contracted form of the Greek spelling of Jesus, a symbol used on gravestones across the Christian world, and its careful carving on an otherwise modest stone suggests that someone, at some point, took particular care over at least one of these burials.
