Grave Yard, Bohola, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Bohola, Co. Mayo

A small oval hillock rising from wet, boggy ground in County Mayo holds a graveyard that seems to have grown with the land rather than been imposed upon it.

The graves do not simply occupy flat ground; they cover the rounded summit of the hill and are terraced into its slopes, following the natural contours, with a further narrow strip of burials squeezed into the level ground between the base of the hill and the enclosing mortared stone wall. The overall effect is of a place shaped by topography as much as by human intention, the dead arranged around a modest prominence that would otherwise dissolve into the surrounding bog.

The enclosing wall stands roughly two to two and a half metres high and runs around the base of the hillock, measuring approximately sixty metres east to west and forty-nine metres north to south. An avenue flanked by stone walls leads east from the entrance to a minor road. A church occupies the eastern half of the hill summit, and roughly forty metres to the north lies a motte, the flat-topped earthen mound characteristic of early Norman fortification, a reminder that this unassuming corner of Mayo was once considered worth defending or controlling. The gravemarkers are predominantly horizontal rectangular slabs set on low drystone foundations, though headstones also appear among them. Most date to the mid to late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and a good number are now in a weathered state, with slabs shifted or tilted, and low walls that once defined individual plots barely clearing the grass. Sod and moss have crept over many of them, softening and partly obscuring what was once carefully laid out.

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