Graveyard, Uskane, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Uskane, Co. Tipperary

An ivy-covered ruin sitting on a low rise of ground in County Tipperary, with a modern lean-to shed pressed against one of its walls, is not what most people picture when they think of medieval ecclesiastical architecture.

Yet the old church at Uskane is precisely that kind of place, where the unremarkable and the genuinely ancient have long since made their peace with one another.

The church appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Killaloe as early as 1302, placing it firmly within the medieval parish landscape of Munster. By 1615, when a Royal Visitation recorded the building as a "church and chancell decayed, all save the vicars part", it had already begun its long decline. What remains today is built of roughly coursed limestone rubble, and despite the deterioration, several architectural details survive worth pausing over. The east gable retains a twin-light ogee-headed window, its pointed, curved tracery characteristic of late medieval Irish ecclesiastical building. Matching single-light ogee-headed windows appear opposite each other in the north and south walls toward the east end. At the west end of the south wall, the doorway itself is gone, but the rere-arch, the inner arch of a wall opening, still holds its shape: a segmental curve of roughly cut voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that distribute the load, with a keystone at the crown. Two small aumbries, wall recesses used to store sacred vessels, sit close together near the south-east corner of the interior, a quiet reminder of the liturgical life once carried on here. Uskane House lies immediately to the north-west, and a possible castle site has been identified nearby, suggesting this was once a more populated and organised landscape than it appears today.

The graveyard itself is elongated, roughly 20 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west, enclosed by a stone wall that ties into the church at its south-west and north-east corners. Headstones range from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, layering several hundred years of local burial practice around a structure that was already a ruin when the oldest of them was carved.

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