Grave Yard, Cordangan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At the base of Slievenamuck hill in County Tipperary, a graveyard sits in open meadow that has largely swallowed it whole.
The enclosure is substantial, measuring roughly 63 metres east to west and 45 metres north to south, bounded by an earthen bank nearly three metres wide, yet only a handful of headstones remain visible above the vegetation. The site gives the impression not of recent abandonment but of a much older quieting, a place that had already begun slipping from active use well before anyone thought to record it.
By 1840, Ordnance Survey correspondents noted that, though the graveyard was large, it was seldom used at that point. The remark was captured in the OS letters of that year, later published by O'Flanagan in 1930. The few legible headstones that survive are of 19th-century date, though others almost certainly lie beneath the heavy overgrowth. A ruined church sits close to the northern wall of the enclosure, oriented slightly northeast to southwest, and shares the same engulfed, untended quality as the burial ground itself. The entrance, in the southern wall, is framed by gate piers with a short stretch of cement-rendered walling on either side, a modest 20th-century intervention in an otherwise much older fabric. Elsewhere in the southwestern corner, a Calvary Mount, a devotional grouping typically depicting the crucifixion scene from Golgotha, was added at some point in the last century, suggesting the site retained some degree of local religious significance even after formal burial use had faded.