Killeen Grave Yard, Mortyclogh, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
A killeen is a burial ground of a particular kind, historically set aside for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground.
That designation alone gives this small enclosure in Mortyclogh a quietly melancholy character, though the site has long since expanded beyond its original purpose and continues to receive burials today. It sits on the western end of a low east-west ridge in County Clare, a position that opens up views in every direction across the surrounding landscape.
The graveyard is a roughly trapezoidal enclosure, running about 45 metres east to west and narrowing from just over 20 metres at the eastern end to around 8 metres at the west. A stone wall bounds the site, with a notable discrepancy in height between its inner and outer faces on the western side, standing 1.2 metres on the interior and 1.9 metres on the exterior, suggesting the ground level has been built up inside over time. A gate in the west wall leads onto a concrete path that crosses the interior. Headstones, some upright and some fallen, mark burials across most of the enclosure, though the western end is notably bare of visible markers. The earliest legible stone belongs to a young girl aged two years and three months, dated 1856. A small plaque fixed to the outside base of the west wall carries the date 1813, though it is now almost entirely illegible. The site was already named and mapped by the time of the first Ordnance Survey edition in 1842, and appeared again on the 1915 edition under the same name. What gives the ridge its additional interest is the company it keeps: a ringfort lies to the south-west, and the site of another sits to the north-east, placing the graveyard within a landscape that has been deliberately shaped and occupied across many centuries.
When surveyors visited in 1997, the graveyard had recently been cleared and tidied through a local community effort. The site is an active burial ground, and the care taken to maintain it is reflected in its condition.