Grave Yard, Crohane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Crohane, Co. Tipperary

At the south-western angle of the graveyard wall at Crohane, set into the stonework at eye level, is the carved window head of a medieval church that no longer exists above ground.

The stone, shaped into an ogee, that is, a double curve coming to a pointed arch, once framed a window in a single-light opening of an earlier church on the site. That church is gone, but pieces of it were not discarded; they were folded into the fabric of the enclosing wall, visible if you know to look for them.

The graveyard sits on a low rise of grassland in an upland part of County Tipperary, with a small stream to the south and a holy well roughly sixty metres to the north-west. The rectangular enclosure measures approximately 59 metres north to south and 48 metres east to west. In its northern quadrant stands a 19th-century Church of Ireland church, a relatively recent presence on ground that carries much older layers. A 17th-century graveslab lies immediately to the south of that church, its inscription now entirely worn away. More striking still, two fragments of a medieval graveslab were found being used as supporting stones beneath a broken 18th-century memorial, pressed into a functional role centuries after their original purpose had been forgotten. The practice of recycling carved stone in this way was not unusual in Irish graveyards, where earlier worked stone was treated as a practical resource rather than a relic to be preserved.

A clean-up scheme recorded at the site had stripped the top sod from much of the graveyard, leaving broken 18th and 19th-century headstones scattered across the ground. Vegetation in the south-western angle had been burnt back entirely. The effect is a site that looks simultaneously cleared and disordered, where the tidying process has brought more fragments to the surface rather than resolving them into any kind of order. That south-western corner, where the medieval stonework sits in the wall and the burnt ground begins, repays a slow and careful look.

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Pete F
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