Grave Yard, Gortfree, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Gortfree, Co. Tipperary

A low earthen platform in the grasslands of north Tipperary holds no headstones, no inscriptions, and no obvious sign that it was ever a formal place of burial.

Two small piles of loose stone sit along the northern and north-eastern edges, possibly the remnants of grave markers gathered up at some point and set aside. A local farmer's account adds a further layer of quiet gravity: there is a belief in the area that this ground was used for burying children.

The site sits on the northern edge of a low ridge running roughly north-west to south-east, with open views across the surrounding upland and out towards the Munster river to the north and north-east. When the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map was produced in 1840, the area was already recorded as a graveyard, marked out as a sub-rectangular enclosure. By the time the 1903 edition of the same mapping was completed, it had been noted as redundant, meaning it had fallen out of use within those intervening decades. What remains today is an irregular platform measuring roughly 65 metres north to south and 28 metres east to west, rising only about 15 centimetres above the surrounding ground. The enclosure was once defined by an earthen bank, now largely reduced to a low scarp, and traces of a filled-in outer fosse, a shallow defensive or boundary ditch, are still detectable as a cropmark, a subtle discolouration in the vegetation that appears from certain angles or in dry weather.

The possibility that this was a cillin, the Irish term for an unconsecrated burial ground used for unbaptised infants and others excluded from formal parish cemeteries, gives the site its particular character. Such places were used quietly, often without markers, and were maintained more through local memory than through any official record. The combination of a redundant graveyard, absent grave markers, and a persistent local tradition of child burial places Gortfree within a wider pattern of marginal burial sites that dot the Irish landscape, most of them similarly unremarked and easy to walk past without recognition.

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