Grave Yard, Cloonfinglass, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Cloonfinglass, Co. Tipperary

At Cloonfinglass in County Tipperary, a graveyard sits at the edge of a slope where the ground drops away sharply to the north-east, east, and south.

What makes it quietly unsettling is not what is there but what is missing. Somewhere beneath the rough grass, near the northern centre of the enclosure, a church once stood. Today there is no visible trace of it above ground, and the spot where it stood has been used, at some point in the recent past, for dumping manure and building rubble, including mounds of soil and a concrete pier.

The Ordnance Survey's first edition six-inch map, surveyed around 1840 to 1841, shows the graveyard as a roughly rectangular enclosure measuring approximately 43 to 56 metres north to south and 40 to 46 metres east to west. Unusually, the south wall was shorter, with the east and west walls splaying outward to meet a longer north wall, giving the enclosure a slightly trapezoidal shape. This kind of irregularity in ecclesiastical enclosures is not uncommon in Ireland and often reflects the organic growth of an early medieval site, where boundaries were established gradually rather than laid out to a single plan. By the time the map was made, the church associated with the graveyard was presumably already gone or reduced to foundations, and the enclosure itself had begun its long retreat from sacred to agricultural use. The site is now largely fenced off as rough grazing land, the mounded soil and rubble serving as a low, unglamorous monument to years of neglect.

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