Grave Yard, Milltown, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Milltown, Co. Clare

In a pasture field near Milltown in County Clare, a graveyard was quietly erased from the landscape.

No headstones, no enclosure wall, no earthwork survives to mark it. The only evidence that anything ever lay here is cartographic: a name on a map, and then, a generation later, a parenthetical admission that even that was gone.

The 1840 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map records an oval enclosure, roughly seventeen metres along its north-west to south-east axis and about twelve metres across, simply labelled "Grave Yard". By the time the larger-scale twenty-five-inch OS map was produced later in the nineteenth century, the label had shifted to "Graveyard (site of)", that small word in brackets carrying the weight of everything that had been lost in the intervening decades. The field is gently undulating improved pasture, with rock outcrop close to the surface, the kind of ground where systematic agricultural improvement and the shallow Clare limestone make poor companions for anything left in the earth. The levelling that obliterated the site appears to have happened sometime between those two surveys, leaving no trace visible at ground level today.

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Pete F
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