What is recorded here

Grave Yard in County Roscommon began as a tight circular ring around the church of Oran and its round tower, but human need stretched it west and north until it swallowed older earthworks and reached the N 60 road. The dead did not stay inside the first boundary; they kept arriving, pushing the living to make more room on the slope. What looks like an ordinary graveyard is actually a record of continuity, where memory refused to stop at the edge of the first circle.

Towards the bottom of the S-facing slope at the SE end of a broad NW-SE ridge. A circular graveyard (diam. c. 70m, 1929 OS 6-inch map) surrounded the church of Oran (RO034-080001-) and the round tower (RO034-080003-), but the graveyard has been expanded W to a N-S section of the N 60 road and N to a field bank (max. dims c. 120m N-S; c. 120m E-W). The expanded graveyard has destroyed earthwork features (RO034-080005-) in this area marked on the 1929 ed. of the OS 6-inch map, and described by O'Donovan c. 1837 as house foundations (O’Flanagan 1931, vol. 1, 61). Earthwork (RO034-080014-) is inside the SE angle of the original graveyard. Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 24 August 2010

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