Burial ground, Marlfield, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
On a natural terrace cut into a south-east facing slope in County Tipperary, an irregular enclosure holds burials that most people walking the surrounding land would never suspect were there.
The enclosure is not especially large, roughly 25 metres across one axis and 43 metres across the other, but it is defined by a broad, flattened stony bank and a V-shaped fosse, a defensive-style ditch, that only came to light during formal archaeological testing. What makes the place quietly unsettling is the combination of its modest scale and what the ground gave up: three or four burials, among them two children and at least one adult, some of the skeletal remains still in partial articulation and oriented roughly east to west.
That east-west alignment is significant. In early medieval Irish burial practice, the convention of laying the dead with the head to the west and feet pointing east is closely associated with Christian influence, and it points to a date somewhere in the broad span between the fifth and twelfth centuries. The fosse and enclosing bank fit the same period; enclosed burial grounds of this type, sometimes called raths or ringforts depending on their primary function, are a recurring feature of the Irish early medieval landscape. Just to the west of the enclosure sits a tree-ring, a circular arrangement of mature trees that often marks the ghost of an earlier earthwork. There are hints of a possible outer bank approximately 16 metres to the south and south-west, and this feature appears to continue into the interior of the tree-ring, suggesting the site may once have been more elaborate than what survives. The ground between this possible outer bank and the burial enclosure is heavily disturbed, however, and that disturbance is likely the result of two separate processes: localised quarrying at some point in the past, and landscaping associated with the Marlfield demesne, the estate that later came to define the area.