Graveyard, Tullaher, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
In the townland of Tullaher in County Clare there is a graveyard quiet enough that the formal record of it remains, for now, effectively blank.
It is listed as a monument, it is acknowledged to exist, and beyond that the documentary silence is near total.
Tullaher sits in a county extraordinarily dense with early medieval remains, where small burial grounds frequently mark the sites of vanished churches or hermit settlements, their origins reaching back to the early Christian period. Graveyards of this kind, sometimes called cilliní or associated with long-dissolved parish structures, have a habit of persisting in the landscape long after every other trace of the community that used them has gone. The ground is kept, or it is not; the stones lean, or they fall; but the place itself tends to remain. Without further detail it is not possible to say whether Tullaher fits that pattern, or whether it represents something else entirely, but the fact of its formal recognition as an archaeological monument suggests it carries more than ordinary historical weight.