Graveyard, Iorras Beag Thiar, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On a south-east-facing slope between sand-dunes and the inlet of Port na Feadóige, a small graveyard on the Connemara peninsula of Iorras Beag Thiar has been quietly absorbing the dead for long enough that its original shape is now almost unrecognisable.
When the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map was drawn up, the site appeared as a modest, roughly oval enclosure, measuring approximately thirty metres by fifteen. That oval has since been squared off and expanded, its boundaries now defined by field walls rather than whatever earlier arrangement contained it.
What makes the site quietly layered is what lies immediately to its south-west: an extensive shell midden, the kind of accumulation, sometimes metres deep, left by communities who processed and consumed shellfish over generations or centuries, discarding the debris in a single concentrated place. Middens of this type are among the more reliable indicators of long, sustained coastal settlement, and the proximity of this one to the graveyard suggests the two features belong to a landscape that has been inhabited and worked for a very long time. A reference in Bigger from 1895 points to some awareness of the site in the antiquarian literature of the late nineteenth century, though the detail recorded then was thin.
Inside the graveyard today, the ground slopes from north-west to south-east, following the natural fall of the hillside. The graves themselves are a mixture of modern markers and older, plain boulders set directly into the earth, with no inscription or ornament. Those unmarked stones are easy to overlook, but they represent a funerary tradition common along the western seaboard, where cut stone was expensive and rough local rock served instead. The dunes and the inlet are close enough that the sound and smell of the sea would rarely be absent.