Killone Grave Yard, Tromra, Co. Clare
Co. Clare |
Burial Grounds
A small oval mound on a gentle south-easterly slope in Tromra, County Clare, is covered with upright stones, none of them bearing a single inscription.
No names, no dates, no carved symbols. The stones, each standing roughly half a metre tall, mark graves in the way that pre-modern rural Ireland sometimes did, quietly and without text, leaving the identity of the buried entirely to local memory.
The site, recorded on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map as Killone Graveyard, measures approximately eighteen metres north to south and ten metres east to west. It sits on slightly raised ground, its edges defined by a low scrub-covered scarp between 0.4 and 0.7 metres high, with faint traces of a fosse, a shallow external ditch, visible in a band of wet ground to the north-west. A fosse of this kind would typically have helped mark the boundary of a consecrated or ceremonially distinct area, separating it from the surrounding land. Thirty metres to the west lies a holy well, a type of site in Ireland often associated with early Christian worship and local patterns of devotion, and the proximity of the two suggests this corner of Tromra held some sustained ritual or devotional significance over a long period. The "Kil" element of the name, from the Irish "cill", points to an early ecclesiastical connection, often a small church or cell associated with an early saint, though no structural remains of any such building are noted here.