Grave Yard, Ardmayle, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Scattered among the headstones at Ardmayle graveyard in County Tipperary are pieces of masonry that have quietly changed careers.
Two limestone corbels, the projecting brackets once used to carry the weight of arches or beams in a now-vanished building, have been pulled from their original context and pressed into service as grave markers. Embedded upright in the ground, their rounded profiles and roughly dressed surfaces suggest they were never cut for this purpose; they simply became useful again when something else was lost.
The graveyard itself sits on a west-facing slope in undulating Tipperary farmland and covers a substantial roughly rectangular area, measuring approximately 82 metres by 116 metres. The majority of its headstones, clustered to the south and east of the Church of Ireland building that occupies the western portion, date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Simpler, uncarved stone markers sit closer to the southwest wall, the kind of modest memorials that often predate the era of inscribed headstones. A graveslab also survives near the east gable of the church. Alongside the corbels, there is a late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century limestone window sill, roughly a metre long, now resting on the plinth of a burial plot some fifteen metres south of the church wall. It retains its original punch tooling, the pattern of chisel marks worked across its width, as well as a reamed edge and a shallow double slope, details that speak to a specific tradition of window construction that likely belonged to a structure no longer standing. The graveyard was extended towards the road to the southeast at some point, and this newer section has served as the primary burial ground since the 1940s.