Grave Yard, Fennor, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Fennor, Co. Tipperary

What makes the graveyard at Fennor quietly remarkable is the layering of time compressed within a single enclosure.

A long rectangular plot, roughly 118 metres from northwest to southeast and 59 metres across, is bounded by a rubble limestone wall and sits on elevated ground with open views in every direction. Within that boundary, two distinct phases of Christian worship sit at opposite ends of the same space, separated by centuries and by denomination, sharing the dead between them.

At the northern end stands a nave and chancel church, the older of the two structures. A nave and chancel arrangement is among the most common forms of early medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture, consisting of a simple rectangular nave for the congregation joined to a smaller chancel at the east end for the clergy and altar. At the southern end, a Church of Ireland building from the nineteenth century marks a very different moment in Irish history, one of the centuries when the established Protestant church constructed or refurbished rural parish churches across the country. Between the two buildings, the graveyard holds eighteenth and nineteenth century memorials. The site does not sit in isolation either. A castle lies roughly 130 metres to the northeast, and a holy well around 820 metres further in the same direction, the kind of clustering that recurs throughout the Irish countryside, where sacred and secular occupation of the same ground accumulated over long periods rather than by any single act of planning.

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