Burial Ground, Srah, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Srah, Co. Mayo

At Srah in County Mayo, a prehistoric earthwork has been put to a second use that was never part of its original design.

The site is a rath, a type of circular enclosure built during the early medieval period, typically as a defended farmstead surrounded by earthen banks and ditches. At some point, the level ground inside this one became a burial place, and it has been recorded as such on Ordnance Survey maps going back to 1838, with the same designation still appearing on the 1919 edition.

What a visitor would find today is a floor of loose stones spread across the rath's interior, with small upright slabs rising here and there from the scatter. Some mark individual graves; others appear to outline them. Much of this is now largely obscured by overgrowth, which gives the place a quality of gradual erasure, the stones present but not quite readable without patience. The reuse of a rath as a burial ground is not unheard of in Ireland; early enclosures, already set apart from the surrounding landscape by their raised banks, carried an obvious sense of bounded, separate space that later communities sometimes found fitting for the dead. Here, though, the details of who was buried, when the ground came into use for that purpose, and whether it was ever formally consecrated remain unrecorded.

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Pete F
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