Grave Yard, Cross, Co. Clare

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Cross, Co. Clare

Running east to west across the middle of this graveyard near Cross in County Clare is a grass-covered ridge that most visitors would take for a natural feature of the ground.

It is, in all likelihood, neither natural nor incidental. At roughly 1.8 metres high and 1.5 metres wide, with the remnants of a wall footing still visible beside it, this earthen scarp appears to mark where the graveyard once ended, before the boundary was pushed outward to the south and east at some point after 1897, when the earlier OS 25-inch plan recorded the site. The dead, in other words, have quietly colonised ground that was once outside the enclosure, and the old limit of their territory is still legible underfoot.

The graveyard sits within a broader ecclesiastical enclosure on a low knoll of exposed rock, looking out over gently undulating pasture with wide views to the east and south-west, and Muckanagh Lough visible to the south. It is a subrectangular space, roughly 49 metres east to west and 48 metres north to south, bounded by a drystone wall. The enclosure it belongs to is an old one, and the northwest corner of the graveyard contains the remains of Kilkeedy Church alongside what has been identified as a medieval house, suggesting a cluster of functions, sacred and domestic, that once operated in close proximity. The headstones within are a mixed company: some are uninscribed, their stones and pedestals now stripped of any legible identity, while more recent graves occupy the same ground. A holy well lies just outside the current wall to the southeast, a feature often associated in Ireland with pre-Christian or early Christian sacred landscapes, where water sources were folded into the ritual life of a community rather than left apart from it. The site appears by name on Ordnance Survey maps from 1842 and again in 1920, though its origins are considerably older than either survey.

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