Grave Yd, Porsoon, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
Most graveyards are rectangular, a practical shape that lends itself to orderly rows and legible maps.
The one at Porsoon in County Clare is five-sided, an unusual geometry that sits quietly on a low rise amid rolling pasture and marshy scrub, drawing no particular attention to itself and making no effort to explain the irregularity. The enclosing wall is drystone construction, built without mortar, rising between 1.25 and 1.6 metres and a full metre thick at the base, substantial enough to have held its shape across centuries. Much of it is now partially covered in ivy.
The graveyard wraps around a medieval church at its centre, and the mixture of burial markers inside reflects the long span of its use. Plain unmarked uprights stand alongside family vaults, iron crosses, and straightforward twentieth-century graveslabs, the whole population of the dead concentrated mainly in the northeastern corner and to the south of the church. Scattered among the graves are several piles of rubble containing architectural fragments, the remnants of structures that have not survived in any identifiable form. The site appears on the Ordnance Survey six-inch maps of both 1840 and 1916, confirming continuous recognition across that period, and in the 1990s the graveyard was extended northward to accommodate further burials. It remains in use today. Roughly 170 metres to the northeast lies St Augustine's Well, a holy well whose dedication connects the broader landscape to an early Christian presence in the area, though the precise relationship between the well and the church at Porsoon is not documented in surviving records.