Grave Yard, Brickendown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At Brickendown in County Tipperary, a medieval church sits at the centre of an almost perfectly square graveyard, set on flat, marshy ground.
That geometry is quietly unusual; most early Irish ecclesiastical enclosures tend toward the circular or oval, reflecting the rounded shape of the original cashels or ringforts within which many were established. Here, the near-square boundary wall, measuring roughly 42 metres north to south and 43 metres east to west, encloses the ruins with a regularity that feels deliberate, even if its origins are not fully explained by what survives above ground.
The church itself is medieval in origin, and the surrounding landscape holds further traces of early activity: three enclosures lie immediately to the south and south-east, and another sits around 200 metres to the west, suggesting this was once a more complex and inhabited site than its present quiet state implies. The headstones clustered to the south of the church ruins are predominantly nineteenth-century in date, the earliest carrying the year 1827. By 1840, the graveyard was recorded, in the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by John O'Donovan and his colleagues, as a large graveyard that was then much in use, indicating a living community still bound to this medieval foundation well into the post-Famine era. Those letters, published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1930, remain one of the more evocative sources for understanding how Irish parishes related to their inherited sacred spaces in the early nineteenth century.
Access to the enclosure is through an entrance gate mid-way along the western wall, with a stile beside it, and a second stile placed roughly centrally in the eastern wall. The marshy ground surrounding the site is worth bearing in mind, particularly after wet weather, which in Tipperary is most of the year.