What is recorded here

Grave Yd. is a large raised D-shaped ecclesiastical enclosure in Tuam town, County Galway, preserving a curving SE wall and a ruined church at its east end. It overlooks a once marshy area to the northwest and sits near St Mary's Cathedral, suggesting a old religious landscape shaped by water, death and devotion. The surviving wall and cross-slab hint that people once walked this place in ritual, memory and daily life.

On S side of High St., in the centre of Tuam town (GA029-199----), and 150m NE of St Mary's Cathedral (GA029-179001-, GA029-179002-); the site would originally have overlooked a large marshy area immediately to NW. The remains comprise a large raised and roughly D-shaped graveyard, at E end of which is a ruined church (GA029-180001-). The curving SE graveyard wall probably preserves part of the circumference of a large, possibly semicircular, enclosure (E-W >100m). Its line is evident from ENE through E to S, principally to S of High St., where S section of Church Lane follows the curving line of the graveyard wall, and also for a short distance of N of it in a property boundary. Swan (1985, 89) has also postulated the existence of large concentric outer enclosure in the slightly curving axes of Vicar St. and Shop St. but there is little evidence to support this. A cross-slab (GA029-180004-) is associated (Higgins 1987, 379, no. 99). (O'Flanagan 1927, Vol. 1, 31, 46; Bradley and Dunne 1992, 172) The above description is derived from the published 'Archaeological Inventory of County Galway Vol. II - North Galway'. Compiled by Olive Alcock, Kathy de hÓra and Paul Gosling (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1999). Date of upload: 05 August 2010

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