Grave Yard, Ballintemple, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Ballintemple, Co. Tipperary

The stepping stones of the stile at the entrance to this hilltop graveyard in County Tipperary are not ordinary stones.

Five of them appear to be corbels salvaged from the old church that stands within the same enclosure, and at least one more has been pressed into the top of the surrounding wall. A corbel is a projecting stone bracket, typically used to support a roof or upper structure, and the fact that pieces of the church's own fabric were quietly repurposed as the means of entry into the graveyard gives the place an air of practical, unsentimental recycling that is very particular to rural Irish ecclesiastical sites.

The graveyard sits on top of a hill in gently rolling pastureland, enclosed by a roughly rectangular stone wall measuring approximately 55 metres east to west and 31 metres north to south. The church occupies the northern portion of the enclosure, and the graveyard wall has been built to key directly into the angles of the church's north-west and north-east corners, suggesting the two structures grew up in close relation to one another. Headstones cluster on raised ground just south of the church, most of them dating from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the earliest recorded inscription from 1776. What is less expected is the number of headstones found inside the church itself, with the latest of those dating to 1951 or 1953. Burial within a church interior was once a mark of social or ecclesiastical status, though by the mid-twentieth century it had long fallen out of common practice, which makes those later dates quietly anomalous. The last burial in the wider graveyard appears to have been in 2001. The site does not stand in isolation: a motte, the earthen mound associated with early Norman fortification, lies roughly 350 metres to the north, along with the remains of Rathcool Castle and a possible seventeenth-century house. Barrettstown Castle is visible on the horizon about two kilometres to the south-south-west.

The entrance is via a gate and stile at the southern end of the east wall, where the public road runs directly alongside. A Calvary stands just inside the gate. The re-used corbels underfoot as you cross the stile are easy to overlook, but worth pausing over before you continue in.

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Pete F
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