Grave Yard, Blackcastle, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A small stone jamb sitting quietly on the south side of a graveyard in County Tipperary is easy to walk past without a second glance, yet it points to a building history that the surrounding landscape no longer fully explains.
The fragment, measuring roughly 35 by 50 centimetres with a chamfered edge, is all that survives above ground of what was once a more substantial architectural presence attached to the church at the centre of this burial ground. A chamfer, a bevelled or angled edge cut into stonework, was a common decorative and structural technique in medieval and early post-medieval Irish ecclesiastical building, and its appearance here on a lone jamb suggests the church was once fitted with dressed stonework of some quality.
The graveyard itself occupies a slightly irregular rectangular plot on a south-west-facing slope, enclosed by a stone wall with a wrought iron gate and stile in the east wall. The church sits roughly at its centre, with all the legible headstones, which appear to date from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gathered to the north of the building. To the north-north-east, about 500 metres uphill, the remains of Moorstown tower house and its bawn are visible. A bawn is the defensive enclosure wall that typically surrounded an Irish tower house, protecting livestock and the immediate household; its survival alongside the tower house gives some sense of how this part of Tipperary was once organised around fortified landholding. The southern boundary of the graveyard is a hedge set on a steep earthen bank, which also marks the line between townlands, a division old enough to suggest this landscape has been parcelled in roughly the same way for centuries.