Burial, Castlenageeha, Co. Mayo

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Burial Sites

Burial, Castlenageeha, Co. Mayo

At the southern end of Trabaun beach on Kilcummin Head, a low cliff face overlooks Killala Bay, and somewhere within it, for an unknown length of time, human remains lay buried beneath a naturally-occurring layer of water-rolled cobbles.

No grave marker, no enclosure, no visible sign of any kind indicated their presence. What eventually brought them to light was not archaeology but erosion, the slow work of the coast gradually undoing whatever had kept them in place.

In April 2003, bones were observed eroding directly from the cliff face. The Gardaí attended and removed most of the remains, and the site was subsequently excavated by the National Museum. What the excavation revealed was two separate concentrations of bone, found at a depth of roughly 0.36 to 0.54 metres below the top of the cliff. The first was a completely disturbed inhumation, meaning a burial in which the body had been laid directly in the ground rather than cremated, of a single individual. The second concentration, found approximately four metres to the south-east, consisted only of foot bones and part of a pelvis. Whether these represent fragments displaced from the first burial by coastal movement, or the partial remains of a second individual entirely, has not been resolved. No grave goods and no formal grave structure of any kind were identified, which makes dating or contextualising the burial difficult. The find was published by Cahill and Sikora in 2011, but the person buried here, the circumstances, and the period all remain open questions.

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Pete F
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