Grave Yard, St. Dominicks Abbey, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
There is something quietly telling about a burial ground that sits not beside a church but within it.
The graveyard at St. Dominick's Abbey in Cashel, County Tipperary, occupies the interior of the Dominican friary church itself, a arrangement that speaks to centuries of use, abandonment, and the slow reclamation of roofless walls by the living and the dead alike.
The Dominicans, a mendicant order of friars founded in the thirteenth century and given to preaching and scholarship, established a presence in Cashel during the medieval period. Like many Irish friaries, their house passed through the disruptions of the Reformation and the suppression of religious orders, leaving the church structure open to the elements over time. It is in this context that burials came to occupy the church interior rather than a conventional exterior churchyard. The site is recorded on the Ordnance Survey twenty-five-inch map under the plain designation "Grave Yard", a label that understates the unusual quality of what it marks: the nave or choir of a friary church converted, by circumstance and long custom, into a burial enclosure.