Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Tombs & Memorials
On the island of Inis Cealtra in Lough Derg, within a graveyard reserved for saints, lies a plain stone slab that has never been given a number.
It bears no carving, no inscription, no ornament of any kind, just an uneven surface of roughly cut stone measuring just over a metre in length and half a metre wide, lying flat on the ground in the eastern half of the enclosure.
The slab appears on a plan of the graveyard drawn by the scholar R. A. S. Macalister during his survey of the site in 1916 to 1917, though he left it unnumbered among the other recorded stones. A recumbent graveslab, as the type is known, is simply a flat stone laid horizontally over a burial rather than set upright as a marker, and they are common across early medieval Irish ecclesiastical sites. What makes this one quietly notable is less what it shows than what it withholds. In a graveyard whose very name associates it with sanctity, this slab offers nothing to identify who lies beneath it, no cross, no name, no formula of prayer. Its precise position has been recorded with some care, 14.08 metres from the north wall and 4.06 metres from the east wall, which only sharpens the contrast between the modern precision applied to it and the complete anonymity it has always kept.
