Earls Island

Earls Island is a small islet in County Galway where local tradition places the grave of Edmund de Burgo, killed in 1338 during the collapse of de Burgo power in Connacht. At the island’s eastern end, a hollow beside a large boulder marks what may have been his burial mound, disturbed by unauthorised digging after it was still recorded as a grassy mound beneath a thorn tree in 1943. The place remains oddly present: a remote spot on Lough Mask where a nobleman’s violent death may still lie hidden under soil and memory.