Church, Ballintemple, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Churches & Chapels
A graveyard on a Tipperary hillside holds the memory of not one church but two, and neither survives intact.
In the eastern quadrant of a roughly rectangular enclosure, where pasture fields slope away to the east and south and a road traces the northern and western boundary walls, the ground has absorbed an entire ecclesiastical history without leaving much visible trace.
When Ordnance Survey correspondents recorded the site in 1840, they noted that the site of the original church was by then occupied by a newer Church of Ireland building, still in use at that time. That replacement church has since disappeared entirely above ground, leaving only three limestone architectural fragments in the eastern quadrant of the graveyard: two jambs and a mullion, the vertical and horizontal stone members that would once have framed a window or doorway. Alongside them lies a late medieval graveslab, a flat commemorative stone of the kind commonly carved in Ireland between roughly the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, often bearing incised crosses or heraldic motifs. The slab's presence suggests the site was in active religious use well before the building that stood here in 1840, though the precise origins of the earlier church remain unrecorded.
What the site offers now is a layered kind of absence: a graveyard that outlasted its churches, a handful of dressed stone pieces that once belonged to a structure no longer standing, and a medieval slab that predates both. The fragments do not explain themselves, but they are there in the grass, on a hill in County Tipperary, quietly persisting.