A roadside memorial is a marker that usually commemorates a site where a person died suddenly and unexpectedly, away from home. They have been placed for centuries, worldwide.
In the United States for example, they originated with the early Hispanic settlers of the Southwestern United States, and are common in areas with large Hispanic populations. Formerly, in funerary processions where a group would proceed from a church to a graveyard carrying a coffin, the bearers would take a rest, or descanso in Spanish, and wherever they set the coffin down, a cross would be placed there in memory of the event.
InIreland they have been placed mainly at the sites of traffic fatalities, but also in the border counties where people have met violent death as a result of the political conflict.
More than 400 memorials across the country have been recorded and photographed by a website, Irish Roadside Memorials.
Apart from their personal significance, these memorials serve as a warning to other road users, and an encouragement to safer driving.
Tags: ireland, obituaries, road deaths, roadside memorials
