Graveyard, Kilkerin, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Kilkerin in County Clare, there is a graveyard quiet enough that the formal record of it remains, for now, essentially blank.
It has been noted, catalogued by name, and assigned its place in the national inventory of monuments, yet the details that would normally accompany such a listing, its age, its layout, any associated ruins or inscriptions, have not yet been made available. That absence is its own kind of curiosity. A place can be old enough to warrant official recognition and still manage to keep most of its story to itself.
Kilkerin is a small rural townland, and graveyards of this type in Clare frequently mark the sites of early medieval parishes or pre-Norman ecclesiastical settlements, sometimes preserving nothing more visible than a boundary wall and a scattering of worn stones. The name Kilkerin itself suggests an older foundation; place names beginning with "Kil" derive from the Irish "cill", meaning a church or monastic cell, pointing to a Christian site that may predate the Anglo-Norman reorganisation of the Irish church in the twelfth century. Whether any structural remains of such an early foundation survive at Kilkerin is not currently documented in any accessible public form.