Graveyard, Shanrahan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
The ruined church at Shanrahan contains two sheela-na-gigs built directly into its fabric, which is unusual even by Irish standards.
A sheela-na-gig is a carved stone figure, typically female and explicitly sexual in pose, found on medieval churches and castles across Ireland and Britain. Their purpose remains genuinely contested: apotropaic warning, fertility symbol, pre-Christian survival absorbed into Christian architecture, or something else entirely. Whatever their origin, finding one is notable; finding two in the same church wall, in a small valley-floor graveyard at the foot of the Knockmealdowns, is the kind of detail that tends to stop people mid-stride.
The graveyard sits on a low hillock in otherwise flat terrain, an irregularly shaped enclosure measuring roughly 109 metres north to south and 79 metres east to west. Alongside the church, the site contains what has been identified as a possible hall-house, a type of rectangular medieval stone building that served as a high-status domestic residence, typically dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The presence of both a hall-house and a church within a single enclosed site suggests this was once a place of some local significance. The earliest dateable headstone, positioned to the east of the church, bears a date of 1736, though the graveyard itself is clearly much older.
The sheela-na-gigs are incorporated into the church fabric rather than displayed separately, so looking carefully at the stonework of the walls is worthwhile. The hillock setting, modest as it is, gives the site a slight elevation above the surrounding valley floor, with the Knockmealdown mountains rising to the south.