Graveyard, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

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Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

On the small island of Inis Gé Thuaidh off the coast of County Mayo, there is a graveyard that exists almost entirely as an inference.

St. Columbkille's Church almost certainly had one, as any early ecclesiastical site of its kind would have done, yet neither the Ordnance Survey maps of 1838 nor those of 1921 record it, no historical documents mention it, and there is nothing visible at ground level to suggest the earth was ever used for burial. The graveyard is, in a peculiar sense, present only in its absence.

The sole physical hint that the dead were once commemorated here is a cross-slab, the kind of flat stone incised with a cross that was commonly used in early medieval Ireland to mark individual graves. This particular stone was found not in any burial ground but built into a field fence to the south-east of the church, repurposed at some unknown point as ordinary boundary material. How it came to be there, and what happened to the ground it may once have marked, remains unrecorded.

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