Robert M Chapple, Archaeologist

There’s probably nothing to really recommend a visit to Killogilleen church and graveyard, near Craughwell, Co. Galway. It’s rather typical of traditional burial sites in rural west of Ireland … there’s a ruined 15 th century church, there’s dated memorials going back to the 1600s, and continuing as late as the 1980s. You seen one you seen ‘em all! Right? … not this time! Back in 1996 I was employed on a F Á S Scheme to oversee the cutting back of the ivy and a general cleanup of the site. I was also tasked with compiling a book of the gravestone inscriptions on the site [ available here ]. One day in July I got called over to see ‘something interesting’ that had just been found … I’d have a few of these calls and for a variety of reasons. Some were cool architectural fragments that were reused as grave markers, some were just rocks (used as grave markers) … in a graveyard? Who'd believe it? I think it’s fair to say that I wasn’t filled with tingling anticipation at this latest di...

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you like this post, please consider re-sharing this post via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc.**] Preface In Part I of this post, I outlined the background to the original project run in conjunction with Craughwell Community Council and FÁS to ‘clean-up’ and document the graveyards of Killora and Killogilleen. I also described a relatively coherent group of six vocational gravestones, belonging to blacksmiths, farmers, a shepherd and a carpenter. In this post I want to look at a number of other stones from the two graveyards. To be honest, there is little that binds them together other than the fact that I think that they are interesting and deserve to be better known.   Fig. 17. Overview of Cloonan stone. A resurrection scene In Killora graveyard there is a large (1.40m high x 1.85m wide), upstanding headstone with elaborate stepped and concave shoulde...

[** If you like this post, please make a donation to the IR&DD project using the button at the end.  If you like this post, please consider re-sharing this post via Facebook, Google+, Twitter etc. **] Preface I think I originally started work on this paper around 1996. I certainly remember working on it around 2000 to 2001. By that time I felt that the paper was not coming together very well. In part, this was due to my attempt to shoehorn together some rather traditional concepts of gravestone art with my somewhat more unusual (read: crazier) take on a statistical approach to the subject (See Chapple 2000). Part of the reason I abandoned this piece was that while I felt that either approach worked well on their own, the two together did not quite fit. Attendant to that, I began to wonder what the audience would be for something like this – perhaps a bit too technical for a genealogical or art-focused reader, but a bit too pedestrian for a professional archaeological aud...