In 2004, I visited the remains of Clontuskert Abbey in east Galway. There was supposed to be a holy well nearby but I couldn’t find it. There was a small group of people chatting at the side of the road nearby so I asked them about it. An old man amongst them remembered the well, that there used to be a “pattern” held there decades before but that it had stpped years ago. Due to land reclamation, the well had disappeared and even he wasn’t sure where it was located anymore. We chatted briefly before I left, but I remember the old man telling me, that, even though the cemetery was no longer in use, that he had a plot reserved so that he could be buried alongside his mother. As he said, with more than a hint of pride, he would be the last man buried in the graveyard in Clontuskert Abbey. I hadn’t been back that way until last month so I stopped to have a look around the Abbey (there is a small carpark on the side of the road, and a well-kept laneway down to the Abbey itself).
In the corner of the graveyard is a plot that is clearly fresher than any of the other graves, and the headstone shows that a man was buried there in 2007 – judging by the dates and names on the headstone, the woman buried in the same plot was his mother. If it was the man I met, then he got his wish. The picture above shows a plaque inside the Abbey commemorating the death of a man with the same surname (though Kelly is a very common Irish name) who died 365 years ago this week, and, just as the last recorded burial was that of a Kelly, so too was the first one.