Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

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Tombs & Memorials

Graveslab, Inishcaltra, Co. Clare

On the island of Inis Cealtra in Lough Derg, a small limestone slab lies quietly inside a graveyard reserved, by tradition, for saints.

It carries no inscription, no carved cross, no decorative detail of any kind. At roughly 83 centimetres long and 46 centimetres wide, it is modest almost to the point of anonymity, yet it sits within one of the most layered early Christian sites in the west of Ireland.

The slab is one of four arranged in a row along the western wall of what is known as the Saint's graveyard, positioned close to the southern end of the enclosure. Graveslabs of this kind, plain and unmarked, were commonly used in early medieval Ireland to mark individual burials within monastic communities, the absence of ornament reflecting either humility or simply the practical limits of the stonecutter's commission. What makes this particular group of four notable is how little formal attention they attracted even from scholars who documented the site in detail. When the archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister produced his plan of the graveyard, published across 1916 and 1917, only one of the four slabs was illustrated. The remaining three, including this one, were present but passed over, left to sit in their row without record or image.

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