2015:194 - Cloonfush, Galway

NMI Burial Excavation Records

County: Galway Site name: Cloonfush

Sites and Monuments Record No.: GA029:058002 Licence number: C00067; E004629

Author: Martin Fitzpatrick

Site type: Graveyard

Period/Dating:

ITM: E 539786m, N 752131m

Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.515703, -8.907907

Galway County Council secured funding to rebuild a section of the mass concrete boundary wall in Cloonfush Graveyard. The wall was damaged when a large tree was knocked by the storms of early 2014. The council made an application for consent to undertake works to a national monument. The consent was granted (C00067) on condition that the works be monitored by a suitably qualified archaeologist and the foundations for the new wall construction be excavated manually.
The ruins of a church (GA029:058001) are centrally placed in the graveyard. The site is traditionally regarded as the site of St Jarlath’s first monastic foundation before his move to Tuam (Gwynn and Hadcock, 1970, 377). The 1st edition OS map records the church as a roofed rectangular building, aligned east-west and set within a circular enclosure. All that survives of the church today are a portion of the west gable and a short section of the north wall with possible traces of the south foundation line. A stone protruding from the ground to the south of the church appears to be the remnants of a round-headed window that may originally have come from this church building. To the south-east of the church is a Bullaun stone (GA029-058004). A Children’s Burial Ground (GA029-058003) is recorded to the immediate south of the church. O’Flannagan’s Ordnance Survey Letters (1927, Vol. 1, 44) record the burial ground as an unenclosed irregular-shaped area measuring 7m x 5m and comprising of four rows of small set stones.
The monitoring works were undertaken over a period of four days in October and December 2015. The work involved the monitoring of the extraction of a large tree root in the south-west of the site and the monitoring of the manual excavation of a foundation trench for two new sections of wall in the south-west and north-west of the site. Nothing of archaeological significance was encountered in the course of monitoring.

References:

Gwynn and Hadcock, 1970

O’Flannagan 1927, Ordnance Survey Letters , Vol. 1

Arch Consultancy Ltd, New Line, Athenry, County Galway