Kilbeg Grave Yard, An Tearmann, Co. Mayo

Co. Mayo |

Burial Grounds

Kilbeg Grave Yard, An Tearmann, Co. Mayo

On the south-western shoreline of Aghleam Bay, on the exposed Atlantic edge of the Mullet Peninsula in County Mayo, there is a graveyard that has effectively ceased to exist, yet has never quite disappeared.

The ground shows nothing: no wall stumps, no grave markers, no enclosure. The only object remaining is a carved cross-slab, known as Leaght Mc. Maheen, still sitting in what would have been the south-western corner of the burial ground. A leacht is a low commemorative cairn or slab monument, often associated with early Christian devotional practice, and this one is the sole survivor of a place that was already fading when it was first formally recorded.

The 1838 Ordnance Survey six-inch map captured the graveyard at a moment when it could still be mapped with some confidence, showing a rectangular enclosure of roughly 35 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, walled on the east and west sides, with the strand forming its northern boundary and a road running along its southern edge. That same year, in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan, the site was described as lying "on the brink of the strand of Feorin in the Townland of Tearmainn," with the note that the location of the old graveyard called Cill beg was still traceable. The name itself, Cill beg, means simply "little church," suggesting an older ecclesiastical foundation beneath or beside the burial ground. By the time the six-inch map was revised in 1921, the designation had shifted to "Site of," confirming that within roughly eighty years the graveyard had passed out of active use and out of visible existence. The strand and the Atlantic weather, in all likelihood, did the rest.

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