Graveyard, Drumacoo, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
Within this roughly quadrangular graveyard on the south Galway coast, one corner has been quietly cordoned off from the rest of the dead.
A walled enclosure to the west of a 19th-century mausoleum reserved a section of consecrated ground exclusively for members of the St George family, separating their remains from those of the wider community whose graveslabs have been accumulating here since the 17th century. It is a small but telling arrangement, the kind of spatial politics that churchyards often preserve long after the social hierarchies that produced them have dissolved.
The graveyard belongs to an early monastic complex at Drumacoo, a site noted in scholarship on medieval Irish religious houses as having genuine significance in the ecclesiastical landscape of the region. The church it adjoins is the older heart of the place, and the 19th-century mausoleum was built directly against the east end of the church's north wall, a placement that physically anchors one family's claims to permanence onto the fabric of a much older sacred structure. A cross-slab, the kind of early carved stone marker found at many early Christian sites across Ireland, is also associated with the complex, hinting at the depth of use this ground has seen. The enclosing drystone wall, a form of construction using stones laid without mortar that has been used in the west of Ireland for millennia, gives the whole site a spare, weathered coherence.
Access to the graveyard is through an opening at the south end of the east wall. The site measures approximately 60 metres east to west and 50 metres north to south, compact enough that the layering of its different periods, early monastic origins, medieval church fabric, 17th-century graveslabs, and the later family enclosure, becomes apparent fairly quickly once you know what you are looking at.