Graveyard, Cill Éinne, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Beneath the shifting sands at the south-eastern tip of Inishmore lies what scholars have long believed to be one of the most densely sacred burial grounds in Ireland, a place where, according to tradition, 120 saints are interred, their graves swallowed entirely by the dunes and leaving no trace whatsoever on the surface.
The graveyard at Cill Éinne is large, roughly 120 metres on its longer axis and enclosed by a stone wall, yet for all its size it conceals far more than it reveals. The visible gravestones are almost entirely from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with a scattering of upright limestone flagstones of less certain date, and nothing in the landscape announces that anything more ancient or extraordinary might lie below.
The tradition of the 120 saints was recorded by the antiquarian T. J. Westropp in 1895, who noted that the burials, said to include that of St Enda himself, the founding figure of the famous monastic community on Inishmore, were concentrated in the area to the north-east of the church known locally as Teaghlach Éinne, meaning the household or family of Enda. By the time O'Flanagan documented the site in 1927, all of those ancient graves had already been buried under sand, with no surface evidence remaining. When excavations were carried out at the church in 1984, a setting of stone slabs was uncovered on its northern side, and the excavator Manning suggested this might represent one of the graves at the edge of that older, sand-buried burial ground, a tantalising fragment at the margin of something much larger and now entirely invisible.