Grave Yard, Temple-Etney, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A tree is slowly winning an argument with an eighteenth-century headstone at Temple-Etney, its roots gradually displacing a stone dated 1771 that has stood in this quiet Tipperary graveyard for well over two centuries.
It is the kind of detail that concentrates the mind: time passing at two different speeds, the organic and the commemorative working against each other in slow motion. The graveyard itself is irregular in shape, roughly 36 metres north to south and 68 metres east to west, set on a north-east-facing slope in gently undulating pasture, with a farm lane running just outside its boundary wall and a public road lying perhaps fifteen to twenty metres to the north-east.
The ruined church at the site sits on a slight rise at the southern end of the enclosure, and what remains of it has been absorbed, somewhat unceremoniously, into the fabric of the place. During a clean-up in 1985, rubble stone, broken headstone fragments, and architectural pieces were gathered and used to build up a low drystone wall, two or three courses high, along the line where the original church once stood. The south wall of the graveyard runs straight, while the other walls curve inward towards a gate in the north-west quadrant, giving the enclosure its irregular outline. A stile in the north-west boundary wall, which incorporates the south-east gable of a separate ruinous building, contains a curving fragment of sandstone set into its face; the curve suggests it may be a voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped stones used to form an arch, though precisely which arch it once belonged to is no longer clear. The earliest legible headstone in the graveyard dates to 1721, and most of the monuments are upstanding. Two large flat tombstones from the mid-eighteenth century lie along the north-east wall, and a table-top tomb, that distinctive raised slab supported at its corners, stands at the east angle, dating from sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century.
The graveyard is accessible from the lane that skirts its boundary, and the stile in the north-west wall provides entry. Earth banked up against the interior of the north section gives that stretch of wall a somewhat earthwork quality from the inside, a small but noticeable oddity worth observing alongside the salvaged stonework that now marks where the church once stood.