Burial Ground, Laragh More, Co. Galway

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Burial Grounds

Burial Ground, Laragh More, Co. Galway

In the level grassland of Laragh More, a scatter of small upright stones breaks the turf in a way that most passers-by would likely mistake for field clearance or the remnants of a collapsed wall.

Look more carefully and a pattern emerges: the stones are set deliberately, marking graves aligned roughly northwest to southeast, the orientation typical of Christian burial practice. The enclosure that once defined this space has largely dissolved back into the landscape, leaving an irregular area that only partly corresponds to the neat rectangular field, roughly 55 metres long and 35 metres wide, that the Ordnance Survey recorded on its six-inch maps.

By the time the third edition of those maps was published in 1931, something had already begun to slip away. The northwestern boundary of the field was shown only as a broken line, suggesting that even then the edge of the site was uncertain or degraded. What persists today is a field wall along the northeastern side, with the remaining boundaries unenclosed. The site is classified as a probable cillin, or children's burial ground, a type known in Irish as a CBG. Cillíní were informal burial places, often used from the medieval period through to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for unbaptised infants and others who were, for various reasons, excluded from consecrated ground. They tend to occupy liminal spaces, old raths, the edges of townlands, or, as here, unremarkable patches of grassland that carry no obvious outward sign of their purpose.

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Pete F
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