Graveyard, Dunneill, Co. Sligo

Co. Sligo |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Dunneill, Co. Sligo

A graveyard in County Sligo that has been in continuous use from the medieval period through to the twentieth century is now so heavily overgrown with brambles and scrub that the headstones are largely consumed by vegetation.

The site is rectangular, measuring roughly 35 metres east to west and 30 metres north to south, and the inscriptions that can still be read on the surviving stones span the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, suggesting generations of local families burying their dead here across several centuries.

The northern half of the enclosure is occupied by the remains of a medieval church, a roofless or ruined stone structure that predates the oldest legible headstones by several centuries and points to a much longer history of religious activity on the site. In 1956, quarrying work in a sandpit immediately outside the south-south-west wall of the graveyard turned up human bones, a discovery that suggests the original burial ground may once have extended beyond its present boundaries, or that earlier, unrecorded interments took place in the surrounding area before the existing walls were established.

The site is not easily navigated. The dense scrub that covers much of the interior makes it difficult to move between the headstones or to read the inscriptions clearly, and the medieval church fabric in the northern section is partly obscured by the same growth. Visitors should expect an overgrown and somewhat rough interior rather than a maintained graveyard, and should look carefully along the south-south-west wall, near where the 1956 quarrying took place, to get a sense of how close the ground outside the enclosure comes to the level of the burial deposits within.

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Pete F
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