Glebe, Grave Yard, Newross, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
On the north-western slope of a low hillock in upland Tipperary, a graveyard sits on ground that was once something else entirely.
The rectangular plot, roughly 44 metres by 60 metres, holds eighteenth- and nineteenth-century headstones alongside the post-1700 ruins of a Church of Ireland building, but the land itself carries a much older identity, one that cartographers and surveyors kept inadvertently recording long after the original meaning had faded.
The site traces its ecclesiastical history at least as far back as 1302, when a church here was listed in the taxation of the Diocese of Cashel, a diocese-wide assessment of church properties that gives historians a rare snapshot of medieval parish organisation in Munster. Beneath the later Protestant ruin lies the footprint of that medieval church. The surrounding land, however, tells a slightly different story. A glebe was the parcel of farmable land assigned to support a parish priest, and in 1654 to 1656, a survey recorded this particular glebe as one acre lying close to the south-west of the churchyard, bounded by a ditch. By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1837, that same land was labelled simply as "the Glebe", which turns out to be the very ground now used as a graveyard. In other words, what was once cultivated land set aside for a priest's income became, over time, the burial ground itself, a quiet inversion that the place-name preserved without anyone necessarily noticing.
