Burial, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

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Burial Sites

Burial, Inis Gé Thuaidh, Co. Mayo

On the upper north-eastern slope of Bailey Mór mound on Inis Gé Thuaidh, a small island off the north-west coast of Mayo, a single grave lies just outside an ancient retaining wall.

It is easy to pass over, leaving almost no trace above ground, and the record of its discovery is itself remarkably thin.

In 1946, the French art historian and archaeologist Françoise Henry was working on the exterior of that retaining wall when she came across human skeletal remains. Henry was a formidable scholar of early Irish Christian art, but on this occasion she noted little about what she found. What survives is a sketch plan from her excavation archive, examined later by researcher S. Greene, whose 2009 doctoral thesis on Atlantic island settlement in north-west Mayo drew attention to the find. That plan indicates an extended inhumation, meaning the body was laid out flat and at full length rather than crouched or flexed, and oriented roughly north to south. The position just outside the retaining wall of Bailey Mór mound places it in a liminal spot, neither fully within the monument's boundary nor clear of it, which raises questions about whether the burial was deliberately placed in relation to the older structure, and what that relationship might have meant to whoever was responsible for it.

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