Church (in ruins), Macreary, Co. Tipperary

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Church (in ruins), Macreary, Co. Tipperary

In a tilled field in the Ivowen valley, County Tipperary, there is nothing left to see.

No wall, no gravestone, no earthwork. A church and its associated graveyard once occupied this flat ground near a small north-south stream, and now the land gives no indication that either ever existed. The absence itself is the story.

Around 1840, when Ordnance Survey workers were compiling their detailed letters on Irish parishes, the church at Macreary was already a ruin, though still a substantial one. Their account, preserved in O'Flanagan's 1930 edition of those letters, recorded two surviving fragments of the south wall, each roughly three feet thick and standing about twelve feet high, built from large gritstones bonded with lime and sand mortar. The interior measured just over eleven metres in length and five and a half in breadth, modest dimensions typical of a rural medieval church. Even then, the site had slipped out of living memory as a place of burial; the surveyors noted that no one could recall anyone being interred there. The graveyard that once adjoined the church's northern boundary had effectively ceased to function as a community space long before anyone thought to record it. Local information gathered more recently indicates that whatever masonry remained was cleared away around the 1960s, most likely during agricultural improvement of the field. What the intervening century of neglect had left standing, a few decades of tillage finished off entirely.

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