Burial ground, Rannagh, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Rannagh, Co. Clare

In a quietly managed pasture at the southern foot of a low ridge in County Clare, the dead lie in a place that offers the living no visible sign of their presence.

The ground has been improved and extensively cleared, and whatever physical trace once marked this as a burial site has been erased, or sunk below the turf. You could walk across it without suspecting anything.

The place name preserves what the landscape no longer shows. The 1915 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map recorded it as 'Killcassaun (Site of)', the word 'kill' deriving from the Irish 'cill', meaning a church or early ecclesiastical enclosure, often associated with a founder saint or local holy figure. Tim Robinson's meticulous mapping of the Burren region, first published in 1977, gives the Irish form as 'Cill an Chasáin', which points to a named individual, Casán, as the site's dedicatee or patron. That the word 'site of' already appeared in parentheses on a map made over a century ago suggests the place had been fading from the physical record for some time before that. Roughly fifty metres to the south-east, archaeologists have identified a possible souterrain, an underground passage or chamber typically associated with early medieval settlement, which hints that a broader complex of early activity may once have existed in this immediate area.

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Pete F
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