Burial Ground, Newchapel, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
There is something quietly self-contained about this graveyard in Newchapel, County Tipperary.
The ground itself has risen over the centuries, lifted by the gradual accumulation of the dead beneath it, so that the burial ground now sits on a low mound of its own making in the middle of undulating farmland. A laneway leads up from the road to a wrought iron gate set between cut sandstone piers, and beyond it a square-shaped graveyard surrounds the ruins of a church positioned roughly at its centre.
The church here has a documented history stretching back to the mid-seventeenth century. The Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656, a detailed land record compiled in the aftermath of the Cromwellian wars, describes it plainly as "the Church fenced with a ditch," suggesting it was already old enough to be noted in passing rather than described in any detail. The majority of the headstones that survive in the graveyard date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with some from the twentieth, and the earliest legible stone carries a date of 1720. That is a relatively modest depth of readable memorial record for a site that was clearly in active use well before that point.
At the time the site was inspected, the graveyard was heavily overgrown, with long grass, nettles, and scrub encroaching on the boundary walls. This is worth bearing in mind for anyone approaching it, as earlier or more modest headstones can easily be obscured by vegetation, and the full extent of the square enclosure is partly masked by the growth along its edges.