Church, Baurstookeen, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Churches & Chapels

Church, Baurstookeen, Co. Tipperary

A Protestant church on the north side of the village of Golden, Co. Tipperary, sits on ground that carries a name older than anything now standing there.

The graveyard attached to it was traditionally called "Relick Murry" or "Reilig Mhuire", an Irish phrase meaning Mary's cemetery. The name has quietly outlasted the medieval structures it once described, surviving today only in the parish name rather than in common use.

The Ordnance Survey Letters of 1840 record that the original Church of Relickmurry once occupied this same ground, with the later Protestant building effectively replacing it on the east bank of the River Suir. By the mid-seventeenth century, the Civil Survey of 1654 to 1656 found the associated glebelands, the agricultural plots set aside for the upkeep of the parish vicar, lying close to the church but described plainly as "wast without Improvement". That snapshot of neglect suggests a site already well past its medieval prime. Fragments recovered within the graveyard add some texture to what has been lost: three pieces of worked stone, almost certainly from the original medieval church, including a section of cusped window tracery, a mullion, and part of a rectangular window head. Cusped tracery refers to the decorative pointed projections cut into the curved stonework of Gothic windows, a feature that places at least some of the building's fabric within a later medieval architectural tradition. Alongside these are two graveslabs dating to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, their survival in the same ground where they were likely first laid a quiet kind of continuity.

The church is reached by a narrow lane off the main street of Golden village, and the graveyard lies to the north. The architectural fragments and medieval graveslabs are visible within the graveyard itself, scattered among the more recent burials rather than formally displayed.

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