Grave Yard, Ballygriffin, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Ballygriffin, Co. Tipperary

The graveyard at Ballygriffin in County Tipperary has an oddly bare interior.

A clean-up scheme at some point repositioned the few surviving gravestones into the southern portion of the enclosure, leaving much of the ground looking emptier than a site of this age has any right to. The effect is quietly disorienting, as though the evidence of burial has been tidied away from itself.

The enclosure is trapezoidal in shape, running roughly 46.6 metres north to south and noticeably wider at its northern end, where it measures 48 metres east to west, than at its southern end, which narrows to around 28.8 metres. A medieval church stands towards the northern end of this space, and inside it survives a seventeenth-century graveslab, a flat carved stone laid over a burial, of the kind that would once have marked a person of some local standing. Seventy metres to the south sit the remains of Ballygriffin fortified house and its bawn, the bawn being a walled or enclosed yard attached to such a house as a form of defensive enclosure, a common feature of plantation-era architecture across Ireland. The proximity of church, graveyard, fortified house, and bawn suggests this corner of Tipperary was once a more concentrated focus of local power and worship than the quiet pasture now implies. Immediately to the west of the graveyard, an old disused quarry occupies the ground where the land begins to fall away towards the Multeen River valley, a detail that hints at the practical industries that would have run alongside the more ceremonial functions of the site.

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Pete F
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