Day 3, Part 2: Three Hours on My Knees with the Coughlans

The sun from the day before had packed up and gone home. Clonmacnoise was back to its usual self: overcast, drizzly, and the kind of damp that gets into the seams of everything you own.

I came prepared. Sort of. My bag held flatbreads, hummus, apples, cashews, a Coke, and my not-so-useful non-raingear, which by now I’d stopped expecting anything from. I also had one piece of kit that turned out to be the MVP of the whole trip: a dustpan brush bought at Tesco in Athlone.

A very old place to be buried

A little context, because Clonmacnoise is not just any graveyard. St Ciarán founded a monastery here in 544, on the banks of the Shannon, right where the main east–west route across the midland bogs meets the river. It grew into one of the great centres of learning in early Christian Ireland, with students coming from all over Europe, and it flourished from roughly the 8th to the 12th centuries.

Being rich and famous came at a price. Clonmacnoise was raided at least 27 times by the Irish, at least seven times by the Vikings and at least six times by the Normans. The final blow came in 1552, when the English garrison from Athlone destroyed and looted it.

What’s left is still remarkable: a cathedral, nine churches, two round towers, three high crosses (the originals, including the 10th-century Cross of the Scriptures, are now safe inside the visitor centre, with replicas standing outside) and more than 700 early Christian grave slabs. Rory O’Connor, the last High King of Ireland, was buried here in 1198.

So when I crouch over a Coughlan stone in the chapel, my people are lying in the same ground that kings, abbots and scholars chose for nearly fifteen hundred years. No pressure, then.

The chapel stones

I spent three hours crouched over the gravestones in the chapel. Three hours. My knees have opinions about it.

I wanted transcriptions of all of those amazing Coughlan stones, because many of them aren’t on Findagrave. That’s not because nobody bothered. It’s because they’re so hard to read. Lichen, wear, sinking, centuries of weather: these stones don’t give up their names easily.

What I really wanted was a clipboard. What I had was no notebook at all, because mine had gone for the wrong kind of walk. So I used the folded-up notes I’d brought for the Valuation Office and wrote on the blank folded bits. Genealogy is nothing if not resourceful.

Then out came the dustpan brush. I swept away leaves, and on one stone, about two inches of water. That one was a real test of patience. I’d brush the muddy water off, read as much as I could in the few seconds before it crept back over the surface, and then brush again. Read, brush, read, brush. A letter here, a date there.

Some stones wouldn’t give anything up to the eye at all, so I read them by touch, running my fingers along the carving like braille. For the bits that are still unreadable, I’m pinning my hopes on AI photo enhancement to coax out a few more letters.

I still have to type them all up from my little folded scraps. That’s a job for a weekend day back home – and a big pot of tea.

What’s left

Many of the stones on the old grounds are sinking or falling. Staff told me that many years ago there were so many you could hardly walk (everyone wanted to be buried there, apparently you are guaranteed to get into Heaven!) but many had to be removed for safety. The caretakers told me there are countless graves here, laid down over many hundreds and thousands of years, and what we can see now are simply the stones that remain above ground.

I asked if anyone had ever made a map – the locals know where some of the unmarked graves are, they told me. And they told me there had been a transcription effort many years ago – a whole team from a university came out – but due to legal battles the actual map and stone transcriptions were never provided. Depriving the world of naming those who laid here seems a crime in and of itself. I would want to win the lottery simply to get this done before more transcriptions fade into history.

The final burial in the old graveyard was in 2023. A woman told me the family talked it over with the caretakers and chose a flat stone, because it would have a better chance of surviving a long, long time. I loved that. It’s a family thinking ahead about the people who’ll come looking, maybe hundreds of years from now.

People like me, with a dustpan brush.

The “new” cemetery (or, the Egan cemetery)

Then I wandered over to the new site, which is mostly newer memorials. Honestly, they should rename it the Egan cemetery. There were so many Egans! But there were Coughlans too, and Deverys, and all the other surnames that have become old friends from researching this area. Walking those rows felt a bit like flipping through my research notes, except in granite.

Two caught my eye straight away: Timothy Devery and Patrick Coughlan, both of Clonfanlough, the same townland as our family farm. More threads to pull.

Even this one is looking pretty full. According to the internet, a plot costs €550, not including the interment fees. A plot holds three full people plus several sets of ashes, and you can’t buy one in advance. You find out about it when you need it, and not before.

Margaret, in the corner of the frame

I’m probably related to a good number of the Coughlans here, old and new. And the day before, I got a little reminder of that without even trying.

On that sunny day I’d filmed a slow pan from the far hill. When I watched it back, I spotted something just as the camera stops to pan back right. In the lower left-hand corner is the grave of Margaret Coughlan Condron, the 2nd great-grandmother of my genealogy “excitement buddy.”

Hers is one of the sinking ones. The grass is creeping in from the sides and slowly closing over it. I’d seen a photo from 2002, when it was cleaned. Even then, after they cut the turf back and scrubbed it, it sat several inches below the surface.

And all those Coughlans, in the chapel, in the old graveyard and in the new one? I will, of course, spend the next year building out their family trees. Every one of them is a thread to pull.

Nature does what it does, and takes us all back. That’s exactly why it matters to get down on your knees, wet trousers and all, and read what’s still there while we can.