Tubbrid Chapel, Tubbrid, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
What first catches the eye at this small Tipperary chapel is the roofline: an extremely steep pitch that seems almost theatrical for a structure barely ten metres long, topped at the west gable by a single round-headed bellcote.
The chapel sits at the eastern end of a graveyard on a west-facing hillside, its walls built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with some sandstone, and quoins of crudely cut limestone blocks. Nothing about the construction is polished, yet the building carries a quiet accumulation of detail that rewards a slow look.
The pointed doorway in the west gable, just under a metre wide and chamfered on its outer face, has a memorial plaque set above it dated 1644, which gives the chapel its clearest historical anchor. That plaque, referred to in a 1913 article in the Journal of the Waterford and Southeast of Ireland Archaeological Society as the Keating memorial, was the occasion for repair work carried out around that same year, when iron girders were inserted to stabilise the structure. Inside, a sandstone stoup, a small basin used to hold holy water at the entrance to a church, projects from the north side of the west gable wall. At the opposite end, the east gable holds an oculus, a small circular window, set into a sandstone frame; the limestone lintel above it turns out to be a reused graveslab, its incised cross still legible within its incised border. Several other seventeenth-century graveslabs are recorded in the graveyard, though two of them lie below the present ground surface and are no longer visible. A slight rise in ground level near the south side of the east end, now grassed over, is thought to indicate a vault beneath.
The chapel sits off the crest of the slope in what is now largely pasture, and the graveyard wall runs directly up to the east gable, giving the whole ensemble a compacted, enclosed quality. The lower portions of windows on the north and south walls at the east end have survived, though their upper sections are gone, which only adds to the sense of a building that has been quietly accumulating time rather than resisting it.
