Lisheencaltragh Burial Ground, Cúíl Each, Co. Galway

Co. Galway |

Burial Grounds

Lisheencaltragh Burial Ground, Cúíl Each, Co. Galway

On the east-facing slope of a ridge in County Galway, a slightly raised rectangle of ground holds the dead without a wall or fence to mark its boundary.

The site is known in Irish as Lisín an Cealltrach, meaning roughly the little enclosure of the burial ground, and it belongs to a category of early Christian and medieval burial places that existed outside the formal structures of parish church and consecrated cemetery. These cillíní, as such grounds are often called, were typically used for the unbaptised, the unbaptised, and others excluded from consecrated ground, though the specific history of who was laid here has not been recorded.

The ground itself measures just over thirty-nine metres in length and a little over twenty metres wide, raised slightly above the surrounding land to a height of between forty centimetres and seventy centimetres. That modest elevation is one of the few outward signs that this was set apart from the fields around it. Scattered across the interior are numerous small set stones, the kind of low, plain markers that were placed without inscription over graves at sites like this throughout the west of Ireland. A modern field wall, running roughly south-southwest to north-northeast, cuts directly through the burial area, a relatively common indignity visited on unenclosed sites once their original significance was forgotten or set aside. Just outside the western edge of the burial ground sits a bullaun stone, a boulder with one or more cup-shaped hollows ground into its surface. Bullaun stones are associated with early Christian sites across Ireland and were used for a variety of purposes, including the grinding of grain and possibly ritual use, though their precise function at any individual site is rarely certain.

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