Grave Yard, Bunnafinglas, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Grounds
At the western end of this burial ground near the River Moy, the ground rises slightly into a subcircular mound, its edges defined by a low, slumped scarp roughly a metre high.
Crowding its top and slopes are dozens of uninscribed stones, many barely clearing the turf, arranged in close north-to-south rows and almost touching one another. There are no names here, no dates, nothing to identify who lies beneath. The density of these anonymous markers, and the tradition that this area served as a Famine-era burial plot, gives the oldest part of the graveyard a quiet gravity that the tidy rows of modern headstones to the north and east do not quite share.
By the time the first Ordnance Survey mapped this area in 1838, the burial ground was already a defined, polygonal enclosure of modest size, roughly 55 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, accessed by a road from the north-east. The oldest confirmed burial on record is that of a John Pue, who died on the 6th of August 1776, though the site is almost certainly older than that. Local tradition holds that an abbey once stood here, and a standing stone survives about 40 metres to the east of the present boundary wall, hinting at a landscape with a much longer ceremonial or sacred history. The enclosure was expanded in 1912, and again in 1941, when the old boundary was replaced by the mortared stone wall that still surrounds the site today. Those two phases of extension pushed the plan into its current L-shape, stretching to around 150 metres at its longest dimension, with the newer sections accommodating formal burial plots from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The burial ground sits on level elevated ground with a wooded slope falling steeply to the west towards the River Moy. The contrast between the ancient, unmarked core and the later formal sections is most apparent if you make your way to the western end, where the inscribed headstones of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are interspersed among those near-invisible uninscribed stones. The standing stone to the east lies just beyond the modern wall and is easy to miss if you are not looking for it.