Burial ground, Cloran Old, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Burial ground, Cloran Old, Co. Tipperary

A field on the crest of a hill in Co. Tipperary looks, to most eyes, like ordinary grassland.

There is no headstone, no boundary wall, no visible sign that this roughly acre-sized patch of ground was ever anything other than a quiet agricultural field. And yet it is not tilled. The local tradition of burials here has kept the plough away, and the land holds its secret beneath a surface that offers almost nothing to the casual glance.

Writing in 1862 to 1863, a local observer named Mullally recorded that the site had the appearance of an old enclosure of about an acre, understood to have been both a burial ground and the location of a chapel. No trace of the building remained even then, but labourers digging in the area had turned up large quantities of human bones, and Mullally noted that the place was held in great veneration by the neighbours. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 shows no burial ground here at all, but by the time the second edition was produced in 1904, the site was marked with a dashed line indicating a roughly rectangular enclosure, approximately 63 metres from northeast to southwest and 41 metres from northwest to southeast, with existing field boundaries forming two of its sides. Those field boundaries survive, but the northern portion of the enclosing element has disappeared entirely from the ground surface. Two other objects complicate the picture further. A standing stone, now collapsed, lies within the area of the burial ground, suggesting activity here that may predate any Christian use of the site. In the ditch of a field boundary to the southwest sits a sculptured pietà, a carved scene depicting the Virgin Mary holding the body of Christ, which may well have been moved here from somewhere else; Mullally noted in the 1860s that it appeared at that time to be in the garden of the nearest house.

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