Graveyard, Mullinahone, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Behind the ordinary frontage of Carrick Street in Mullinahone, roughly forty-five metres back from the road on a low rise, lies a patch of rough, overgrown ground that may or may not contain the dead.
No headstones mark it. No grave-markers survive, if they ever existed. The area has served, at various points, as a dumping ground, and a chain-link fence has been built inside the line of a tumbled old wall to the north. And yet the ground has been left fallow, as if whoever has oversight of it senses that disturbing it would be a mistake.
The possible graveyard is thought to be associated with a medieval chapel, one that has disappeared so completely it is no longer visible at ground level. Nearby, about thirty metres to the north-west, the remains of a hall-house survive. A hall-house is a relatively simple form of medieval domestic or administrative building, typically a first-floor hall raised above a ground-floor undercroft, and their presence usually signals a site of some local consequence. That both a hall-house and a chapel once stood in close proximity here suggests this corner of Mullinahone carried more weight in the medieval period than its present state of concrete walls, conifers, and scrub vegetation would suggest. The precise history of the chapel, and whether a formal burial ground was ever formally laid out beside it, remains unresolved.
