Grave Yard, Carriganagh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Most of what was once the graveyard at Carriganagh is now a small field.
That quiet transformation is easy to miss, but it points to something genuinely odd about this site: a large, roughly oval enclosure measuring some 89 metres along its longer axis sits on a gradual north-facing slope in pasture, and only a fraction of it, the south-eastern quadrant, is still treated as sacred ground. The rest, bounded by the same earthen bank that once defined the whole, has simply been absorbed into the agricultural landscape.
The church and its associated burial ground were noted in the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a major mid-seventeenth-century land assessment, which confirms the site had already been established for some time by then. When the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1840, the entire large enclosure was clearly marked as the graveyard. The enclosing bank is still substantial, roughly three metres wide and rising nearly two metres above the external ground level, with a stone revetment, a facing of stone laid against the earthen bank to hold it in place, that has collapsed in sections. Inside the larger enclosure, the ground is noticeably uneven, with several low platforms that may reflect earlier internal divisions or sub-divisions of use within the space. The portion still formally recognised as a graveyard is fenced off with a low concrete wall, posts, and wire, entered through a gate at the western end. It is heavily overgrown with trees and scrub, and contains only a small number of headstones, all dating to the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The graveyard is no longer in use, and the contrast between what the 1840 map records and what now functions as consecrated ground gives the site an quietly unsettled quality, a large earthwork that once held the community's dead, now parcelled into field and thicket.