Grave Yard, Garrangibbon, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Just below the crest of a Tipperary hill, with South Lodge house visible to the north-east, a small graveyard sits beside what was once a gallop-ring, the circular track used for exercising horses.
The proximity is striking: the dead on one side, the thundering of hooves on the other. The graveyard's boundary is only partly defined, a stone wall marking the western edge while post and wire fencing now encloses the area where the tombstones stand, giving the place a makeshift, quietly forgotten quality.
The site appears on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840 as a triangular plot measuring roughly 70 metres by 52 metres. By the time the revised edition was published between 1901 and 1905, the recorded area had contracted considerably, to a diamond shape of around 44 metres by 20 metres, occupying only the eastern portion of the original ground. Whether this reflects actual encroachment, changed land use, or simply a revision in how the boundaries were drawn is not clear. Eleven table-top tombs survive, that distinctive style in which a flat slab rests horizontally on low supports, and the earliest legible inscription dates to 1799. Three further headstones are present but entirely unmarked, rough upright slabs with no text to identify whoever lies beneath. The graveyard appears to have served the household of South Lodge rather than a wider parish community, making it a private burial ground of the kind that was not uncommon among landed families in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Records indicate that a church once stood nearby, though no physical trace of it remains visible at ground level.
