Burial ground, Moneen, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Moneen, in County Clare, the ground holds the dead.
That much is recorded. A burial ground is listed here, quietly occupying its place in the archaeological record, but the details that would normally follow, the dates, the denomination, the names of those interred or those who tended the site, remain for now out of reach.
Moneen is a small townland in Clare, a county whose landscape is threaded through with early Christian enclosures, penal-era graveyards, and older burial sites whose origins predate written record entirely. The word "moneen" derives from the Irish móinín, meaning a small bog or boggy patch of ground, which gives some sense of the terrain these communities historically worked and buried their dead within. Whether this particular site is a medieval parish cemetery, a cillin (an informal burial ground traditionally used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from consecrated ground), or something older still, is not currently documented in any accessible form.