Scartnamarve Grave Yard, Crannagh, Co. Galway
Co. Galway |
Burial Grounds
On a gentle south-facing slope in County Galway, tucked into ordinary pastureland, a small burial ground sits largely forgotten beneath a thicket of hazel.
It is easy to miss, bounded only by a low field boundary that does little to distinguish it from the surrounding farmland, and its graves are marked not by upright headstones with legible inscriptions but by small, irregular slabs set at random across the ground, most of them barely a third of a metre tall and only a few centimetres thick. There is no formal entrance, no path worn to the perimeter, nothing to signal that this patch of scrub holds the dead.
The burial ground at Scartnamarve, in the townland of Crannagh, measures roughly 25 metres on its longest axis and just under 15 metres across, a modest rectangle whose orientation runs roughly north-north-west to south-south-east. The grave-markers themselves follow no particular arrangement; they are placed as if by individual decision rather than any communal plan, each one a plain, uncut stone shaped only by nature. This kind of informal rural burial ground, sometimes called a cillín when associated with the interment of unbaptised infants or others excluded from consecrated ground, was once a quiet feature of the Irish countryside. The hazel growth that now covers much of the site suggests it has not been actively used or maintained for some considerable time.