Grave Yard, Ballyhomuck, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Tucked into the fabric of a church wall at Ballyhomuck, Co. Tipperary, was a medieval floriated graveslab, a stone carved with stylised floral or foliate decoration and originally intended as a grave marker, that had long since been repurposed as an ordinary building block.
It was only during a recent clean-up of the graveyard that the slab was recovered and recognised for what it was. That kind of quiet recycling, where the commemorative becomes structural and then disappears from view entirely, gives this place an unusually layered quality.
The graveyard sits on a low rise of ground in open grassland, enclosed by a limestone wall and measuring roughly 34 metres north to south and 46 metres east to west. Inside, 18th and 19th century memorials cluster to the east, south, and west of an early medieval nave and chancel church, the ruins of which sit close to the northern boundary wall. Several architectural fragments from the church or related structures have been repurposed a second time, now serving as grave markers in their own right. The Bermingham family, one of the Anglo-Norman dynasties that shaped much of Tipperary's medieval landscape, held the lands of Ballyhomuck at the time of the Civil Survey of 1654. In that survey, Richard Bermingham is recorded as proprietor of 109 acres, comprising 80 arable, 24 pasture, and 5 woodland, valued at ten pounds per year. He died in 1672, and his memorial now occupies the north-east corner of the chancel, making him one of the few individuals at this site whose name, date, and stone all remain connected.
The graveyard remains in use, with recent burials occupying the narrow strip between the north wall of the church and the north boundary wall. Visitors looking closely at the south wall of the nave, just east of the doorway, can see where the floriated graveslab was embedded before its recovery, a small absence in the stonework that marks something older than the wall itself.
