Graveyard, Glebe, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At Glebe in County Tipperary, what looks at first like an ordinary rural graveyard turns out to be a site where the visible and the barely-there exist side by side.
The church that once anchored this place has almost entirely disappeared into the ground; what remains are grass-covered footings tracing the outline of a nave and chancel arrangement, divided by an overgrown cross-wall. The gap in the southern wall may mark where a doorway once stood, though even that much is inference. The ground inside is conspicuously uneven, suggesting that whatever lies beneath has been shifting or settling for a long time.
The graveyard sits on a low natural ridge, and this positioning turns out to matter. An aerial photograph taken in 1973 revealed the partial curve of what may be an earlier enclosure immediately to the west of the church and burial ground. On the ground, the evidence is less clear: a broad, low rise roughly eight metres wide and barely half a metre high could be the remnant of a levelled bank, and a shallow dip at its southern end hints at an outer fosse, the term for the ditch that typically accompanied an earthen enclosure. Whether this represents an older ecclesiastical boundary or something else entirely remains unresolved. The natural ridge the graveyard occupies runs westward and stops just before this possible bank, which raises the question of whether the ridge itself was once used to define the enclosure's edge, or whether a larger structure was intended. Tucked against the western end of the ruined church is a small walled plot containing the vault of the Lidwell family, a private burial enclosure set apart from the general graveyard, whose headstones date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
