Grave Yard, Wallscourt, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that sits quietly in pastureland on the western edge of Kilreekill village in County Galway, this burial ground is unusual in that it serves two ecclesiastical buildings at once, lying to the south of both an older chapel and St. Mary's Church.
The site measures roughly 73 metres northwest to southeast and 59 metres northeast to southwest, a modest but not insignificant footprint for a rural parish burial ground, and it continues to receive burials today, having been extended westward and northward from the original church boundaries.
The oldest legible headstones and grave-markers here date from the late eighteenth century, placing the formalised use of the site within the period when Catholic communities across Ireland were slowly regaining the ability to build permanent places of worship and to mark their dead in stone. The presence of the so-called Old Chapel alongside St. Mary's Church suggests a layering of religious use across different eras, a common enough pattern in Irish villages where congregations outgrew earlier structures or where a newer church was built without the older one being demolished outright.