Graveyard, Toomullin, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
Most graveyards in the Irish countryside survive in some form, even when long disused, their stones tilting quietly into the grass over centuries.
The one at Toomullin, on the north bank of the Aille River in County Clare, is an exception. In 1982 it was bulldozed, and today almost nothing marks the fact that it ever existed. The sole physical trace is a low earthen scarp running around the northern half of the adjacent church exterior, which may represent material from the graveyard itself pushed up against the church wall during the clearance. It is an absence that is easy to miss entirely.
The valley setting is flat and east to west, with steep hillsides rising to the north and south and higher ground closing off the view to the east, the kind of enclosed pastoral landscape that tends to preserve old features simply because it is not worth the trouble of removing them. That calculation apparently failed here. Among those believed to have been buried in this graveyard was Conor MacClancy, who died in 1625, and a flagstone bearing a Latin inscription and the initials 'C.C.' was associated with his burial place. The MacClancys were a notable Clare family, hereditary brehons, meaning legal scholars and arbiters, to the O'Briens of Thomond, and a marked stone for a member of that family surviving into the twentieth century would have been a rare thing. Whether the flagstone was destroyed in 1982 or removed beforehand is not recorded. Roughly 45 metres to the east-southeast of the church there is a holy well, a type of site, often associated with a local saint or with curative tradition, that tends to outlast the more formally maintained structures around it.