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 the dead of many centuries, there lies a plain slab of stone that managed to slip through the cracks of formal record.

It was drawn, noted, and then left unnumbered, occupying a quiet corner of the Saint's graveyard without ever quite making it onto the official inventory.

The slab is a recumbent graveslab, meaning it lies flat over or near a burial rather than standing upright as a marker. It measures just over a metre in length and roughly forty centimetres across, and carries no decoration of any kind. Its precise position is known: in the western half of the graveyard, seventeen metres from the southern wall and two and a half metres from the western wall. What makes it a small curiosity is its appearance in the work of R. A. S. Macalister, the prolific archaeologist who surveyed the graveyard in 1916 and 1917 and produced a detailed plan. The slab appears on plate XV of that plan, carefully drawn in, but assigned no number. Whether this was an oversight or a deliberate withholding of a classification is not recorded. It exists, therefore, in a slight administrative limbo, present in the visual record but absent from the numbered catalogue.

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Pete F
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