Grave Yd, Grangemockler, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
The eastern end of this graveyard at Grangemockler is conspicuously empty of headstones, while elsewhere across the site rough, uncut field stones serve as grave markers in place of carved memorials.
That combination, the bare ground at one end and the unworked stones at the other, gives the place an unfinished quality that sits at some remove from the tidied-up, legibly inscribed burial grounds more commonly encountered in rural Tipperary.
The site sits on the southern end of a broad ridge, the land dropping steeply beyond the graveyard's boundary towards a small east-west river valley below. The original enclosure was sub-rectangular, measuring roughly 67 metres north-east to south-west and about 30 metres across, defined not by masonry but by an earthen bank, the kind of boundary more often associated with early medieval ecclesiastical sites than with later post-Reformation graveyards. A church occupies a raised area at the southern end of this older enclosure. At some point in the nineteenth century, a stone wall was built to enclose the southern portion of the site, creating a roughly triangular space measuring 33 metres north to south and 49 metres east to west. The earlier south-western boundary was not erased in the process; it survives as a low scarp running north-east to south-west, still visible within the line of the later west wall. The church interior holds several eighteenth-century headstones, the earliest inscribed in 1722, while the great majority of stones across the wider graveyard belong to the nineteenth century. Only a single twentieth-century headstone is present, which itself raises quiet questions about when this place effectively ceased to be used as an active burial ground.