Burial mound, Pollacorragune, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Sites
On a ridge in north Galway, four people lie buried in ground that no longer shows any trace of their grave.
The mound that once marked their resting place has vanished entirely from the surface, leaving a field that gives nothing away to a passing eye. What makes this site quietly arresting is not what remains but what was found and then, in a sense, lost again to visibility.
When archaeologists excavated the site in 1935, they uncovered a low circular mound roughly eight metres across and one metre high. Rather than a wholly artificial construction, it turned out to be a natural knoll that had been deliberately enlarged with additional soil, the landscape itself pressed into service as a foundation. Beneath it lay four extended inhumations, meaning the bodies had been laid out at full length rather than in the crouched position more typical of earlier prehistoric burial. They were placed in shallow, unlined trenches, with no stone cists or timber to protect them. Among the finds were several corroded iron fragments, animal bones, and what may have been a shield boss, a domed iron fitting from the centre of a round shield. The presence of iron and the extended burial rite together suggest an Early Medieval date, broadly the period running from the fifth to the twelfth century, though the corrosion of the iron made precise identification difficult. The mound sits approximately two hundred metres south-east of a second tumulus in the same area, suggesting this part of the ridge held some significance for the communities who buried their dead here.
No visible surface trace of the mound survives today. The excavation of 1935 is the only record of what the ground contained, and the site exists now as a location on a map rather than anything a visitor could stand beside and read.