Graveyard, Erry, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
What appears at first glance to be an ordinary rural graveyard in County Tipperary is, on closer inspection, the surviving core of something far larger and more complex.
The rectangular enclosure at Erry, measuring roughly 58 metres north to south and 34 metres east to west, is defined not by standing walls but by a low, grass-covered bank of earth and stone, the remnant of an original perimeter wall that was once nearly a metre thick. The church whose congregation once filled this ground has also largely vanished, leaving only its wall-footings visible at the northern end of the enclosure, humps and lines in the turf that require a certain quality of low, raking light to read clearly.
The graveyard sits at the base of a west-facing hillslope on flat grassland, with higher ground rising to the east and a stream running roughly 115 metres to the west. What makes Erry particularly absorbing is how much of a former settlement appears to survive in the surrounding landscape. Some 100 metres to the south lie the earthwork remains of what may have been a castle and bawn, a bawn being the defensive enclosure, typically stone-walled, that surrounded and protected an Irish tower house or fortified dwelling. A watermill once operated 239 metres to the south-west, suggesting a working agricultural community of some scale. Perhaps most evocatively, earthworks of a possible deserted settlement extend to the west, north, and south of the church and graveyard, the faint corrugations and hollows of houses, boundaries, and yards that have been slowly subsiding into the grass for centuries. Taken together, these features point to a place that was once a functioning local world, complete with spiritual, defensive, and economic infrastructure, now reduced to a series of quiet mounds on an undulating Tipperary hillside.