Burial ground, Keelhilla, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Keelhilla, Co. Clare

On the open karst of County Clare, a small rectangular enclosure once marked a spot that geologists, of all people, thought worth recording.

The Geological Survey of Ireland, whose field teams crisscrossed the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries making notes on far more than rocks, flagged this site in Keelhilla as a possible burial ground. By the time anyone went to look properly, it was gone.

The Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1916 still shows the enclosure clearly enough, a modest plot of roughly twelve metres north to south and ten east to west, sitting amid rough, overgrown pastureland on mixed open karst, the exposed limestone pavement country characteristic of the Burren region. When the site was inspected in 1997, the enclosure had been levelled. Several field walls to the east and south had been cleared away too, leaving little visible trace of whatever had once been contained there. The landscape around it carries other survivals: a field system of slab walls lies to the north, and a ringfort sits approximately 120 metres to the west-southwest. Ringforts, roughly circular enclosures originally built for settlement and farming in the early medieval period, are common across Clare, and their proximity to burial sites is not unusual; the two often share the same quietly worked-over corners of the Irish countryside.

What the Keelhilla enclosure actually held remains uncertain. The classification as a burial ground was always provisional, recorded on a geological fieldmap rather than confirmed by excavation, and the levelling of the site means that question may never be fully resolved. It is the kind of place that slips through the record almost entirely, noticed once, mapped, and then undone by the ordinary business of farming before anyone could look more closely.

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Pete F
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