Slab-lined burial, Belladooan, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Sites
Three slab-lined graves were uncovered on an esker ridge near Belladooan in County Mayo during sand quarrying in the 1930s, and what is unusual about them is not simply their age but the quiet forensic detail they yielded before vanishing entirely back into the landscape.
An esker is a long, narrow ridge of gravel and sand deposited by a glacial meltwater stream, and this one runs northeast to southwest with the Belladoan River curving around its western and northern edges. The graves were found barely thirty centimetres below the surface, as if the ridge had held them in suspension rather than buried them.
Two of the graves were uncovered in 1931 and subsequently recorded by Morris in 1932. They lay parallel to each other, roughly three metres apart, and both were aligned east to west. Each had been constructed from thin slabs of what the record describes as greenstone, a stone type not commonly found in the immediate area, which raises its own quiet questions about where the material came from and why it was chosen. The better-preserved of the two measured approximately 1.8 metres long and 0.3 to 0.4 metres wide, with three upright slabs forming each long side, a single closing slab at the western end, and two large roofing slabs laid across the top. There was no closing slab at the east end, and the floor was left unpaved. Inside lay an extended male skeleton, head to the west, with no grave goods present. The bones were removed and later held at University College Galway. In the 1990s, a radiocarbon date was obtained from a bone sample, placing the burial somewhere in the late Iron Age or early medieval period, broadly between the mid-third and mid-seventh centuries AD. The second grave from 1931 was entirely empty. A third grave, found in 1938 about six metres away during further quarrying, also contained a skeleton.
Nothing of the graves now survives above or below ground. The site is occupied by old quarry pits, several metres in diameter and roughly two metres deep, overgrown and largely reclaimed. The man buried there sometime between late antiquity and the early medieval period, interred with care in imported stone on the spine of a glacial ridge, left no objects behind him, only bones, and eventually not even those remained in place.
