Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On the holy island of Inis Cealtra, set in the lower Shannon near Mountshannon in County Clare, a plain stone slab lies flat against the ground in the north-east corner of a burial ground known as the Saint's graveyard.

It carries no inscription, no knotwork, no cross, nothing to identify who lies beneath it or when they were placed there. It is simply a recumbent graveslab, a little over a metre long and just over half a metre wide, quietly occupying its precise position: 7.9 metres from the north wall, 2.2 metres from the east.

What makes this slab quietly interesting is its relationship to the record that half-captured it. The archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister surveyed and drew the Saint's graveyard in 1916 and 1917, producing a detailed plan on which this slab appears. He drew it but gave it no number, leaving it in a kind of archival limbo, present on the page but not formally counted among the site's monuments. Inis Cealtra itself is one of the more significant early medieval ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, associated with Saint Caimin and bearing the remains of several churches, a round tower, and an extensive collection of grave markers, many of them inscribed with names or simple crosses. Against that backdrop, an undecorated, unnumbered slab is easily overlooked, which is perhaps why it has lingered without further annotation for so long.

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Pete F
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