Grave Yard, Strake, Co. Mayo
Co. Mayo |
Burial Grounds
On the southern flank of Clare Island, a graveyard holds several centuries of the dead in a space where medieval stonework and 19th-century headstones occupy the same ground, almost as if the island simply never stopped burying its people in the same spot.
Set on a natural south-facing terrace some 250 metres back from the rocky shoreline, the site has an unusually layered quality: the living built a new Catholic church against its western wall in 1861, but the older medieval abbey, a nave and chancel church with a domestic north wing, still dominates the centre of the enclosure.
The graveyard itself is a rectilinear area measuring roughly 54 metres east to west and 31.5 metres north to south, enclosed by a mortared stone wall. The distribution of graves around the abbey buildings is uneven, with noticeably fewer plots on the north side of the church, a pattern that may reflect older folk customs around the relative desirability of burial positions in relation to a sacred building. Most of the inscribed headstones and grave slabs date from the 19th century, though some reach back to the late 18th, and the sequence continues into the 20th. Standing in the eastern half of the graveyard is a tall pillar stone carved with a cross, an object that likely predates much of what surrounds it. Around 125 metres to the northwest lies a holy well known as Toberfelamurry. Holy wells in Ireland were traditionally associated with veneration, healing, and patterns, the localised devotional gatherings that often combined prayer with social ritual, and the proximity of this one to both a medieval abbey and a still-active burial ground suggests a concentration of sacred significance that accumulated here over a very long period.
