Templemichael Grave Yard, Templemichael, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Templemichael Grave Yard, Templemichael, Co. Tipperary

At least four of the headstones in this small Tipperary graveyard are not headstones at all, not originally.

They are dressed limestone fragments salvaged from the medieval church that still stands, in partial ruin, in the graveyard's north-west corner. A mullion with chamfered edges, two further mullions with hollow chamfers and an external rebate, and a chamfered sill or lintel have all been repurposed as grave markers, the carved stonework of window surrounds pressed into service for the dead long after the building itself fell out of use. It is an quietly telling detail: the church could no longer be maintained, but its stone remained too worked, too considered, to be left as rubble.

The graveyard sits on a flat raised platform amid gently rolling pasture in County Tipperary, enclosed by a roughly square wall of sandstone rubble, approximately 26 metres across and standing two metres high, capped with concrete in more recent times. The original entrance, in the south wall, is now given over to stone steps rather than a swinging gate. The earliest legible headstone dates to 1740 and sits in the south-east quadrant, though the bulk of the markers are nineteenth century in date. Set into a stone pier beside the present gate access is a bullaun stone, a rounded boulder with one or more cup-shaped depressions worn or carved into its surface. Bullaun stones are found widely across early medieval Ireland and are often associated with ecclesiastical sites; their precise original function is debated, but they were likely used for grinding, ritual, or both, and they frequently accumulated later folk significance around healing and cursing traditions.

The church remains in the north-west quadrant would repay a careful look on any visit. The re-used architectural fragments among the headstones are easiest to spot once you know what to look for: the characteristic angled cuts of chamfered stonework are a world apart from the plain slabs that surround them, and they carry the proportions of windows rather than memorials. The road running along the east side of the graveyard makes the site straightforward to locate and approach.

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