Killeenacurry, Turlough, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Grounds

Killeenacurry, Turlough, Co. Clare

A small burial ground sitting on a low knoll in County Clare, entirely surrounded by improved agricultural land, has a way of making the past feel stubbornly present.

The fields around it have been cleared and smoothed into productive pasture, yet this modest subrectangular plot, roughly 27 metres east to west and 18.5 metres north to south, has resisted absorption. It sits slightly above the surrounding ground, defined on its southern edge by a low natural scarp and enclosed on the north and east by a modern drystone wall, with field clearance marking its western boundary. The whole effect is of a place that the surrounding landscape has worked around rather than swallowed.

The site appears on Ordnance Survey maps as far back as the 1842 six-inch edition, where it is named Killeenacurry, and the name recurs unchanged on the 1915 edition. The word killeen, from the Irish cillín, typically refers to a small, unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants or others who were excluded from formal churchyard burial, though the term could also denote any small early ecclesiastical enclosure. The graves here are marked with unworked flat slabs, rough and plain, the largest reaching around 60 centimetres in height and 40 centimetres in width, alongside some headstones. A notable concentration of both slabs and headstones clusters to the south-west of centre, and here the markers are oriented north to south rather than the east-west alignment more common in Christian burial practice, which hints at either considerable age or a distinct local tradition.

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Pete F
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