(Disused)'. Measuring roughly 24 metres north to south and 26 metres east to west, and enclosed by a stone wall, it is the kind of place that reads as unremarkable on the landscape until you understand what it was for. Workhouse burial grounds were where the destitute poor, those who died within the walls of the Poor Law institution and whose families could not or did not claim their bodies, were interred, often in unmarked graves and in considerable numbers during the Famine years of the 1840s.

The Ennistymon workhouse, which served the surrounding parishes of north Clare, stood approximately 400 metres to the south-east of this ground. Like most Irish workhouses, it was built under the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, which divided the country into poor law unions, each required to construct and maintain a workhouse funded by local taxation. When the Great Famine struck in the mid-nineteenth century, these institutions were overwhelmed far beyond their intended capacity. The dead required burial, and the ground at Dough, separated from the workhouse itself by a short distance, served that function. By the time the 1916 map was made, the site had already been marked as disused, its period of active use consigned to an earlier and grimmer chapter.