Grave Yard, Ballintemple, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard on a hilltop in County Tipperary carries within it a quiet layering of time, from a graveslab of late medieval date through to headstones erected across the eighteenth century and beyond.
What makes the site quietly arresting is not any single monument but the unbroken continuity of use, a community returning to the same ground across several centuries, long after the church that once stood here had gone.
The roughly rectangular enclosure, measuring approximately 73.6 metres on its longer axis, sits on elevated ground with pasture fields falling away to the east and south, and a road running along the northern and western boundary. The surrounding wall, about a metre in height and finished with a lime mortar cap, has survived in reasonable form, and the entrance on the north-west side is framed by cut limestone piers, a detail that suggests some care was taken with the threshold even as the church itself, which occupied the eastern quadrant of the enclosure, fell into disuse. That east quadrant is also where the oldest graveslab lies, placing the earliest commemorated burials in close physical proximity to where the building once stood. The church is recorded separately and no longer survives above ground, leaving the graveyard to function as the primary legible feature on the site.