Graveyard, Kilmastulla, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At the graveyard of Kilmastulla in County Tipperary, the dead are arranged in two distinct communities, separated by several centuries and by the accident of what survives.
To the west of a ruined church site, rows of unmarked headstones run north to south in quiet, anonymous lines. Beside them, to the east, only the low wall-footings of the church itself remain above ground, the building long since reduced to a suggestion of its former outline.
The site sits on a low natural rise in a valley of undulating countryside, a modest elevation that nonetheless would have made it a logical focal point for a medieval parish. Its age is not in question: Kilmastulla was listed in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Cashel in 1302, a survey compiled to assess church revenues across Ireland at the time. That single reference places this now-quiet graveyard within a functioning ecclesiastical network at the turn of the fourteenth century. The church whose footings remain visible in the eastern sector of the graveyard would have served that community, though when exactly it fell out of use is not recorded. The eighteenth and nineteenth-century headstones, enclosed by a modern sandstone wall, represent a later phase of burial that continued long after the church itself was gone.
In recent times, topsoil around the church site has been cleared away, and a footpath has been laid to the west of the footings. The effect is to make the architectural remains more legible, though it also means the site now carries the slightly contrasting quality of a place caught between careful preservation and the long, quiet continuity of use that has defined it for over seven hundred years.