Burial ground, Knopoge, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Knopoge, in County Clare, there is a burial ground old enough to have been recorded and mapped, yet quiet enough that almost nothing about it has entered the written record in any accessible form.
It appears on the archaeological register, it has a monument number, and then it more or less disappears from view. That gap between being known and being understood is, in itself, a kind of curiosity.
Knopoge is a small rural townland in Clare, a county whose landscape is dense with early Christian grave sites, pre-Norman cemeteries, and the kind of enclosed burial plots, sometimes called cillíní, that communities maintained for centuries outside the formal parish system. Without further detail on this particular site, it is impossible to say whether this ground was associated with a church, a local family, or an older tradition of burial that preceded Christianity in the region. Clare has all three in abundance. The very fact of its registration as a monument suggests it was considered significant enough to protect, even if the particulars remain, for now, out of reach.