Gardeenrossalia, Rossalia, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Grounds

Gardeenrossalia, Rossalia, Co. Clare

On a gentle north-facing slope above Aughinish Bay in County Clare, there is a burial ground whose most conspicuous feature is a wall that may never have been finished.

The graves themselves are marked not with inscribed headstones but with fieldstones and small flags, some arranged in rough north-south lines, most of them anonymous. The dead here left no names behind them, and the structure built, perhaps, to enclose and protect the place was apparently abandoned before it could do its job.

The site appears on the 1842 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, already named Gardeenrossalia, its boundary indicated with a dashed line rather than a solid one, which suggests its edges were never clearly defined even then. By the 1915 edition, the map notation had changed to include the words 'Burial Ground (Disused)', and something else had changed too: the small village of roughly twenty houses recorded in the fields to the east in 1842 had vanished entirely. Whatever community had used this ground for burial no longer existed. What remains today is a roughly rectangular area, about fourteen metres east to west and thirteen metres north to south, its southern boundary formed by a thick rubble wall, three metres high in places and nearly four metres wide, faced with unworked mortared stone. It is partially collapsed on its south and west sides and ivy-covered along its upper surface, giving it a quality described as folly-like, more monumental in its mass than its function would seem to require. A short stub of wall runs northward from it at a right angle, and the working interpretation is that this is either the remnant of a larger enclosing wall that was demolished at some point, or the beginning of one that was simply never completed.

A holy well dedicated to St Patrick lies approximately three hundred metres to the south-south-east. Its proximity suggests this corner of Rossalia had some degree of sacred significance in the landscape, the burial ground and the well occupying the same quiet slope above the bay, each now largely overlooked.

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