Burial, Pollacorragune, Co. Galway

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Burial Sites

Burial, Pollacorragune, Co. Galway

A gravel quarry in County Galway is not the setting one might expect for an early medieval discovery, yet in July 2018 machinery cutting into a low natural mound on an esker ridge brought up human bones that had lain undisturbed for well over a thousand years.

Eskers are long, sinuous ridges of gravel and sand deposited by meltwater rivers running beneath glaciers during the last Ice Age, and their elevated, dry ground made them attractive landmarks and burial sites across many periods of Irish prehistory and early history. That this particular mound sits in pastureland roughly 112 metres from the re-aligned river Clare, quiet and unremarkable in the landscape, says something about how much still goes unnoticed until a digger blade catches it.

Staff from the National Museum of Ireland attended the site and recovered almost the complete skeleton, despite the disturbance caused by quarrying. The individual had been interred in the extended inhumation rite common to early Christian burial practice, laid out flat and oriented on an east-west axis, a positioning widely associated with Christian communities who aligned the dead towards the rising sun. There was no identifiable grave cut and no grave goods were recovered alongside the bones. Radiocarbon dating confirmed an early medieval date, and skeletal analysis suggested the individual was male and somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old at the time of death. The absence of a formal grave cut is unusual; it may indicate a burial placed directly into the soil of the mound rather than into a dug pit, though the quarrying activity complicates any firm conclusions. About 200 metres to the west-southwest lies a rath, a circular enclosure of the kind typically used as a defended farmstead during the early medieval period, and the proximity of the burial to that settlement feature may not be coincidental.

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