Site of Bruis Church, Bruis, Co. Tipperary

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Site of Bruis Church, Bruis, Co. Tipperary

A rectangular graveyard sits on an upland ridge in County Tipperary, and somewhere beneath its grass lies a church that has all but ceased to exist above ground.

No masonry, no gable-end, no scatter of cut stone announces where it stood. What remains is a low mound rising gently at the centre of the enclosure, and the reasonable suspicion that it marks the footprint of the vanished building.

The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 recorded the church as standing north of centre within the graveyard, which at least confirms it was still legible as a structure, or a ruin of one, at the time of the survey. Since then, the ground has absorbed it. One hundred and sixty metres to the north stands the Bruis motte, a raised earthwork of the kind thrown up by Anglo-Norman settlers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the foundation for a timber tower or fortified residence. The proximity of motte and church is not unusual for this period; newly arrived lords often planted themselves close to existing ecclesiastical sites, or established both together as part of the same act of settlement. Whether that pattern applies here is not recorded, but the spatial relationship between the two features is suggestive. The site occupies the south-eastern end of a north-south ridge, open ground with long views in every direction, the kind of position that made sense both for defence and for a community landmark.

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