Burial ground, Bealkelly, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Bealkelly, in County Clare, there is a burial ground old enough to have been formally recorded as an archaeological monument, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has made it into the public record.
It sits, noted but undescribed, in a landscape that Clare shares with hundreds of similar sites, many of them pre-Christian, medieval, or associated with the tradition of the cillin, a term for informal burial grounds often used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated soil. Whether this site belongs to any of those traditions remains, for now, an open question.
Bealkelly is a small rural townland in Clare, a county whose limestone terrain has preserved an extraordinary density of early monuments, from ring forts and standing stones to church enclosures and field systems that predate the Norman period by centuries. Burial grounds in such settings frequently occupy ground that was considered sacred long before the arrival of Christianity, and their continued use, sometimes into the nineteenth or even twentieth century, reflects the deep conservatism of rural funerary practice in Ireland. Without more specific detail on record, the age, extent, and character of this particular site cannot be pinned down, but its presence in the archaeological register places it in a lineage of places that communities chose, and kept choosing, for their dead.