Grave of the Kings, Kildaree, Co. Mayo

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Burial Sites

Grave of the Kings, Kildaree, Co. Mayo

A low, bramble-choked mound in a Mayo pasture carries a name far weightier than its modest dimensions suggest.

Marked on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as 1838 and again on the 1922 edition, this slight rise in the townland of Kildaree is said to be the resting place of two kings, a claim embedded in the landscape long before anyone thought to record it formally.

The townland name itself offers a clue. Kildaree derives from the Irish Cill Dá Ríg, meaning "church of the two kings", and the mound carries that same memory forward. When the scholar and place-names expert John O'Donovan was gathering material for the Ordnance Survey Letters in 1838, he noted that in Kildaree "there is a grave in which two kings are said to be interred." He did not name the kings, and neither the oral tradition he was recording nor any subsequent source appears to have filled that gap. What survives on the ground is a roughly oval cairn, a cairn being a deliberate heap of stones sometimes raised over a burial, measuring about eight metres north to south and just under five metres east to west, and rising to about a metre at its eastern end before tapering to roughly half that height on the western side. Three large rounded boulders push through the surface, one near the northern edge, one near the centre, and the largest at the south-western edge. The upper layer of loose stone is probably the accumulated result of generations of field clearance rather than original structure, and the whole thing is partly grassed over and largely hidden beneath clumps of brambles and blackthorn. A fragment of an old field fence runs along just two metres to the west. Nephin, the solitary mountain that dominates this part of County Mayo, rises on the southern horizon.

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