Burial, Cahersherkin, Co. Clare

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Burial Sites

Burial, Cahersherkin, Co. Clare

On a south-facing slope at Cahersherkin in County Clare, a modest rise in the ground holds what the landowner describes as a famine burial.

There is no headstone, no enclosure wall, no formal marker of any kind; only the land itself, shaped in a way that suggests something deliberate beneath it.

The feature takes the form of a slightly raised rectangular area, roughly 9.3 metres by 10.4 metres at its base, tapering slightly toward the top and rising just 0.1 to 0.3 metres above the surrounding ground for most of its extent, though the southern edge climbs to around 0.8 metres. At the north-east there is a low mound, little more than a swell in the earth, and at the west corner a small raised platform measuring about 3 metres by 2.2 metres. Flat stones, some used as a form of surface cladding along the western and north-western edges, are visible on and around the feature. The setting is quiet and unremarkable at first glance, lowlying ground with higher land rising to the north and east, the kind of place that might pass unnoticed entirely. Famine burial grounds, which proliferated across Ireland during and after the catastrophic famines of the nineteenth century, were often established outside consecrated ground, in marginal or liminal spaces, and were rarely documented with any precision. Many survive only through the memory of local families and the faint topographical traces left by the burials themselves. This site at Cahersherkin appears to be one such place, its identity preserved not by any official record but by the knowledge passed down to the person who farms the land around it.

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