Grave Yard, Derrycloney, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
What makes this graveyard quietly puzzling is the way it seems to have disappeared from the map.
Between the first Ordnance Survey edition of 1840 and the revised edition produced around 1900 to 1905, the burial ground at Derrycloney vanishes from the cartographic record entirely, as if the land had simply forgotten what it once held.
The site sits on a gentle south-east-facing slope in rolling pastureland, with the river Suir running somewhere between 300 and 700 metres to the south and west. What survives on the ground is an oval earthen enclosure, measuring roughly 43 metres north to south and just over 51 metres on the north-east to south-west axis. The surrounding bank is modest but legible: around two metres wide at its crest, four and a half at its base, and rising only a quarter to half a metre above the interior ground level. Within the southern quadrant sit the remains of Derrycloney church itself. On the 1840 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, the graveyard appears as a dashed outline, indicating an unenclosed area, roughly D-shaped and considerably smaller than the oval enclosure now visible, extending south and east of the church with the church wall forming part of its northern boundary. By the turn of the twentieth century, that outline is gone. Whether the burial ground had fallen out of use, been absorbed into farmland, or simply been omitted by a surveyor working from different criteria is not recorded. A further possible enclosure lies about 80 metres to the east, adding another layer of unresolved complexity to the immediate landscape.