Burial ground, Burgagery-Lands, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Just thirty metres east of a medieval town wall, a quiet patch of ground in Burgagery-Lands, County Tipperary holds what excavation revealed to be a group burial site of unusual character.
Twenty-three articulated human skeletons were uncovered here, laid out in an orderly east-west alignment with the majority facing east, a configuration broadly consistent with Christian burial practice. What sets this site apart, however, is not the arrangement of the dead but the story embedded in their bones and the objects found alongside them.
The excavated evidence, reported by Henry in 1994, points firmly to the mid-seventeenth century or later. Fifteen of the individuals could be identified as male, most between eighteen and forty-five years of age, and the majority were buried together in groups of two or more rather than in individual graves. Dental wear patterns from sixteen of those examined suggested habitual clay pipe smoking, and significant quantities of clay pipe stems and bowls were found among the remains, a detail that sits well with the post-1600s date the excavator proposed, as the clay pipe became common in Ireland during that period. Three spherical buttons recovered beside one skeleton carry mid-seventeenth-century associations. More striking still, two of the individuals had pistol balls lodged in their thoraxes at the time of burial. Pottery sherds were also recovered across the site, adding further material context. The picture that emerges is of young to middle-aged men, likely pipe smokers, some of whom died violently, interred with a degree of care and order just outside the boundary of an older medieval settlement.
The site lies south of the Town Hall and east of Dowd's Lane, close to the line of the surviving medieval town wall. The ground itself offers little visible indication of what lies beneath it, but that proximity to the old wall is its own quiet historical marker, placing these seventeenth-century dead at the edge of a town whose earlier defences were already centuries old when they were buried there.