Grave Yard, Ballyduagh, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Ballyduagh, Co. Tipperary

Two plain stone slabs lie a few metres apart at Ballyduagh, one inside the ruined church and one just outside it.

Neither carries a legible inscription, and neither quite matches the other in thickness, yet both share a chamfered edge that links them stylistically. They may once have formed part of a 17th-century graveslab, or possibly an altar, though no one can say for certain. That uncertainty is part of what makes this quiet corner of County Tipperary worth attending to.

The graveyard sits on a low rise amid undulating pasture, with marshy ground to its west and the remains of a 17th-century house visible about 150 metres to the south. The rectangular enclosure measures roughly 41.7 metres north to south and 30 metres east to west, with the church ruins placed off-centre toward the northern end. By 1840, when the Ordnance Survey Letters recorded their observations, the site had no enclosing wall and was only rarely used for burial. Within fifty years, however, a boundary wall had been raised, as noted by White in 1892, and that wall still stands in good condition today, with an entrance near the eastern end of the southern side and a stone stile just to its west. The headstones are gathered in the south-east corner of the enclosure, the earliest firmly dated to 1802, though the form of at least one or two others suggests a late 18th-century origin. Most belong to the latter half of the 19th century, with a handful carrying dates into the first decades of the 20th.

The single headstone inside the church, placed near the west wall, has lost its inscription to time but resembles the 1802 stone in the graveyard, which hints at a shared origin or carver. It is the two chamfered slabs, though, that linger in the mind. Lying at a distance of just 3.8 metres from one another yet apparently separated by some unrecorded event, they suggest a longer, more complicated history for this site than the surviving headstones alone would imply.

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