Grave Yard, Killilagh, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Killilagh, Co. Clare

A carved limestone head wearing a biretta, the soft round cap associated with Catholic clergy, once lay loose among the headstones of this small graveyard in the Clare countryside, projecting from a rectangular block in the manner of a corbel, the kind of carved bracket used to support roof timbers or stonework in medieval churches.

It had been there long enough to become a noted local curiosity before it was taken in 1971, later recovered, and eventually moved to the Burren Centre in Kilfenora, where it can still be seen. The graveyard also holds a scattering of architectural fragments whose origins are not entirely accounted for, and several pieces recorded by earlier researchers have since disappeared altogether.

The site sits on a low ridge in undulating pastureland, with wide views across the surrounding countryside. It is a subrectangular enclosure, roughly 48 metres along its longer axis, defined by a stone wall with a gate on the western side. A church occupies the centre and highest point of the sloping interior, and the graveyard has been in continuous use for centuries: most headstones date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but at least one goes back to around 1630, suggesting the site's significance long predates the modern period. The Ordnance Survey mapped and named it as early as 1842, and the same designation appears on the 1920 edition as well. Immediately outside the southern wall sits a McNamara family burial vault dating to 1882, a solid statement of local dynastic identity in dressed stone. About 85 metres to the east lies a ringfort, the circular earthwork enclosure type common across Ireland from the early medieval period, and an enclosure of uncertain function sits just to the west-southwest, hinting that the graveyard occupies a landscape that has been arranged and rearranged by human activity across a very long span of time.

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