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 that has accumulated centuries of the dead, there lies a graveslab so modest it was recorded but never named.

Measuring just 0.84 metres long and 0.23 metres wide, it is a recumbent slab, meaning it lies flat rather than standing upright, and it carries no decoration at all. No inscription, no carved cross, no knotwork. It simply rests in the western half of the Saint's graveyard, 15.9 metres from the southern wall and 8.1 metres from the western wall, as though someone once took careful note of exactly where it was and then moved on.

The slab appears on a plan of the graveyard drawn by R.A.S. Macalister during his survey of 1916 to 1917, published as plate XV of his study. Macalister drew it, but assigned it no number, a small act of ambiguity that leaves the slab in a peculiar administrative limbo, documented and yet somehow uncatalogued. Inis Cealtra itself has a long ecclesiastical history, the island having served as an early Christian monastic site, and the Saint's graveyard is among its more significant features. That a slab of this size, with no ornament to suggest status or period, should sit within that space raises quiet questions about who it marks and why no further effort was made to identify or distinguish it.

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Pete F
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