Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On the island of Inis Cealtra in Lough Derg, within a graveyard known as the Saint's graveyard, there lies a plain flat stone that has never been given a number.

It is a recumbent graveslab, meaning a slab laid horizontally over a burial rather than set upright as a conventional headstone, and it carries no carving, no inscription, no ornament of any kind. At 1.2 metres long and 0.64 metres wide, it is modest in scale, positioned in the western half of the graveyard, roughly 20 metres from the southern wall and 3 metres from the western one.

What gives the stone a quiet peculiarity is its place in the documentary record. The archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister surveyed the graveyard in 1916 and 1917, producing a detailed plan on which he drew this slab, yet he assigned it no number, leaving it charted but unnamed among the other monuments he catalogued. Inis Cealtra itself is a place of considerable early medieval significance, a small island that once supported a monastic community, and the Saint's graveyard is understood to be among the older burial grounds associated with that settlement. The slab sits within that layered context without announcing itself at all.

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