Church, Bawnmadrum, Co. Tipperary

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Church, Bawnmadrum, Co. Tipperary

At Bawnmadrum in County Tipperary, a graveyard occupies a fairly steep northwest-facing slope overlooking a boggy valley, and somewhere beneath or within it, a church may once have stood.

The word "may" is doing considerable work here. No walls survive, no foundation stones protrude from the grass, and the only physical evidence is a slightly raised area near the centre of the burial ground, a modest swelling in the ground that could point to where a small ecclesiastical building once existed.

The Ordnance Survey Letters, a remarkable nineteenth-century project in which scholars travelled Ireland documenting local antiquities and placename lore, noted the site with characteristic candour. As recorded by O'Flanagan in 1930, the letters state plainly that "it is supposed there was a small Church, but no walls or foundations are visible there at present." That phrasing, "it is supposed", carries the weight of local memory operating in the absence of physical proof. The church, if there was one, had already vanished so thoroughly by the time the surveyors arrived that the land itself offered almost nothing to confirm the tradition. What remained was the graveyard, continuing in use on its sloping ground, the hill rising further to the southeast behind it.

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