Burial ground, Kilmaloge, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Kilmaloge, Co. Tipperary

At the northern end of a ridge in County Tipperary, beneath ordinary pasture, there is thought to lie a burial ground old enough to have entered local tradition as a matter of quiet certainty rather than curiosity.

The hill drops away sharply to the north and more gradually to the east and west, and at its summit a stony, roughly circular raised area of around 35 metres across marks the most likely location of a cill, the Irish term for a small early ecclesiastical enclosure or cell, often associated with early Christian burial.

Writing in 1908, the antiquarian Power recorded that human skulls had been found on the hill, and that a cill once stood there. The tradition of a burial place on the summit persisted long after any visible structure had gone. The raised, stony ground is considered consistent with an enclosure of the type that typically surrounded such sites, and a separate recorded enclosure on the summit is thought to be directly associated with the burial ground. Whether the site dates to the early medieval period, as most Irish cills do, or to something earlier, the physical evidence at ground level amounts to little more than a faint circular swell in the grass, the kind of anomaly that rewards looking twice.

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Pete F
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