Burial, Kyleballygalvan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Sites
At Kyleballygalvan in County Tipperary, a burial site is recorded on the 1903 edition of the Ordnance Survey six-inch map, marked out across a roughly rectangular area measuring 80 metres north to south and 10 metres east to west on a south-facing slope of pasture.
The unusual thing about it is the silence it now keeps. Visit the field today and there is nothing to see; the ground has been reseeded, the grass is even and undisturbed, and whatever was once understood to lie beneath this particular hillside has left no visible trace on the surface.
That an area this size was considered significant enough to mark on a nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey map suggests it was at some point locally known or recognised as a burial ground, even if no monuments, headstones, or earthworks were ever prominent features. The OS six-inch maps, surveyed and revised across Ireland through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, recorded what surveyors observed or were told by local informants, and the presence of a site on the 1903 edition implies some degree of contemporary awareness. Whether the burials were early medieval, post-medieval, or of some other period is not recorded. The slope itself offers wide views in all directions, which in earlier centuries was sometimes a consideration in the placement of the dead, though no specific tradition is attached to this location in the surviving record.