Burial, Kilmannin, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Sites
In a field of improved pasture in County Mayo, a domed mound of earth about fifteen metres across and two metres high rises in isolation beside a road.
It looks, at first glance, like something ancient, a barrow or a cairn left over from prehistory. It is not. The mound was built quite deliberately in the late twentieth century, constructed around a Famine-era grave to keep it safe when quarrying operations removed the ridge in which the grave had originally been dug.
Local tradition holds that during the Great Famine, a man and a woman were travelling the roads together when the woman died. She was buried where she fell, at the base of an east-facing ridge slope, her grave marked by a large stone slab set against the hillside. The Famine, which devastated Ireland from the mid-1840s, left thousands of people displaced and dying far from home, and roadside burials of this kind were not uncommon. What is unusual here is what happened to the grave afterwards. When the ridge was quarried away in the late twentieth century, the burial site itself was left untouched, and the surrounding ground was shaped into the mound now visible, preserving the location rather than erasing it. The original stone slab, measuring roughly 1.1 metres by 0.55 metres and about 0.14 metres thick, now lies on top of the mound rather than standing against the slope that no longer exists.
The site sits at the edge of a field, with a road running along its eastern boundary. The mound's artificial origins are acknowledged openly, which makes it stranger and more affecting rather than less so. Someone, at some point, decided that a nameless woman buried during the worst years of Irish history was worth preserving, even as the landscape around her was being fundamentally reshaped.