Burial ground, Cappakea, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Cappakea in County Clare lies a burial ground that has, for now, slipped through the cracks of the digital record.
It is a recognised archaeological monument, formally classified and given a place in the national inventory, yet the details that would tell us who is buried there, how old the site is, or what form it takes remain unavailable to the casual researcher.
Cappakea is a small rural townland in Clare, a county with an unusually dense concentration of early medieval and prehistoric sites, many of them associated with the old Gaelic territories of Thomond. Burial grounds in this part of Ireland range from Bronze Age cist graves, where a body was interred in a small stone-lined pit, to early Christian cillíní, informal burial places often used for unbaptised infants and situated just outside the boundaries of consecrated ground. Without further detail it is impossible to say which tradition this particular site belongs to, or whether it preserves above-ground features such as enclosing walls, grave markers, or earthwork boundaries. It is recorded, it exists, and beyond that the picture is frustratingly thin.