Grave Yard, Kilmoon, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Kilmoon, Co. Clare

A graveyard that has absorbed a medieval church into its own boundary wall is not something you encounter every day.

At Kilmoon in County Clare, the north wall of a medieval church has been folded directly into the north wall of the enclosing graveyard, so that the two structures share the same masonry. The subrectangular enclosure, roughly 48 metres north to south and nearly 42 metres east to west, sits at the highest point of gently undulating pastureland, with wide views opening out to the south and west. Tucked into the north-east quadrant, close to the gate and stile, is a cross-slab, the kind of early Christian grave marker that is simply a flat stone incised with a cross, unadorned and usually undated.

The site clusters a remarkable number of distinct features into a relatively small space. Immediately south of the church ruin stands the remains of a medieval house, and beside it a fragment of a pointed window or door embrasure, the kind of Gothic architectural detail that hints at a settlement with some ambition during the medieval period. Most of the visible headstones date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but some plain, uninscribed upright slabs scattered across the south-west-sloping ground are likely older. A researcher named Large, writing in 2011, recorded a varied mix of memorial types: uninscribed headstones, flat slabs, pedestal headstones, chest tombs, and a number of discarded arched jamb stones, the shaped stones that once framed doorways, now lying loose. About 117 metres to the west lies a holy well, a spring long associated with veneration and healing in the Irish tradition. More intriguing still is a standing stone that once sat roughly 470 metres to the north-east, now fallen, which may have served as a termon marker, a boundary stone defining the sanctuary lands or protected territory of the medieval church. The graveyard itself was recorded and named on the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as early as 1842, suggesting it was already a well-established landmark by that point.

The gate and stile are in the north-east corner, and the graveyard is described as well-tended and pathed, making it relatively easy to move around the site. The medieval church ruin, the cross-slab between it and the gate, and the remnant of the pointed embrasure near the medieval house are all concentrated in the north-east quadrant, so that corner rewards the closest attention.

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