Grave Yard, Inis Oírr, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Inis Oírr, Co. Galway

On the smallest of the Aran Islands, a graveyard sits divided against itself.

The ground inside its drystone enclosure drops roughly three metres from the south-west to the north-east, the two levels separated by an almost vertical natural crag. It is an unusual arrangement, the kind of thing that makes you realise the living did not always have the luxury of choosing flat ground for their dead.

The site is associated with Cill Ghobnait, a church that occupies the north-east quadrant of the roughly subrectangular enclosure, which measures approximately 48 metres on its longest axis. The graveyard wall, built in drystone and varying in height and thickness, reaches about a metre wide at the north. Burials appear to have been concentrated to the south of the church, and stone slabs protruding through the sod point to the likely presence of slab-lined graves beneath. Three leachtaí are also visible within the enclosure. A leacht is a small, low cairn or mortared stone structure associated with early Irish Christian practice, often used as a focus for prayer or commemoration, and their presence here suggests a long devotional use of the site. Scholars have noted that the graveyard wall may itself follow the line of a much older ecclesiastical enclosure, meaning the boundary visible today could be tracing the edge of a very early Christian foundation, its original form preserved almost accidentally beneath centuries of rebuilding and repair.

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