Grave Yard, Ballyslatteen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
In the centre of this sub-rectangular graveyard in County Tipperary, there is a conspicuous absence.
No headstones occupy the middle ground, and the most likely explanation is that a church once stood there, its walls long since fallen and its foundations swallowed back into the earth. The building is recorded but invisible, detectable now only by the gap it leaves in the pattern of the dead around it.
The graveyard itself sits on a slight rise amid tillage fields, with a public road running along its southern edge. Its stone enclosure wall contains a space that broadens noticeably from north to south, ranging from around 30 metres wide at its narrowest to 55 metres at its broadest. Most of the legible headstones cluster along the western and southern sides, and the oldest among them in the southern half dates to the mid-eighteenth century, though the majority are nineteenth-century in date. Four above-ground vaults, a form of family burial enclosure built at ground level rather than below it, are scattered through the graveyard; all appear to be of nineteenth or twentieth-century date and have since become grass-covered, giving them a quietly sunken look. A calvary mount, the kind of stepped outdoor devotional structure depicting the crucifixion that became common in Irish graveyards and churchyards during the mid-twentieth century, was added in 1948 and now sits roughly at the centre of the space. A gravel path runs east to west from the entrance in the southern wall, loops around the calvary mount, and sends a branch northward toward the eastern end of the graveyard, giving the whole layout a functional geometry that contrasts with the organic scatter of the stones around it.