Graveyard, Killora, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Killora, Co. Galway

Among the headstones at Killora, some carry more than a name and a date.

A number of the broader tombstones here bear occupational symbols, carved emblems that identified the dead by their trade or craft, a practice that was once widespread across Irish graveyards but has become increasingly overlooked. The site is an irregularly shaped enclosure, roughly seventy metres along its longer axis, bounded by a drystone wall of rough limestone blocks and sloping sharply downward to the south.

The graveyard is associated with a medieval church that occupies its south-western end, and the two together form a layered record of this part of County Galway across several centuries. The standing headstones date from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, but the church contains late medieval graveslabs as well, pushing the commemorative tradition on the site considerably further back. A full survey of the headstones and graveslabs was carried out by Chapple in 1995, documenting both the inscribed stones in the open graveyard and the older slabs sheltered within the church walls. The drystone boundary wall, built in the same rough limestone that characterises so much of this part of Connacht, defines the enclosure in a way that feels entirely of the landscape rather than imposed upon it.

Access to the graveyard is from the south-east. The steep southward slope means the ground underfoot is uneven in places, and the medieval church at the far end of the enclosure rewards a closer look, particularly for the graveslabs recorded inside it, which belong to a tradition of carved funerary stonework that was already old when the earliest of the inscribed headstones outside were being cut.

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