Grave Yard, Graystown, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
On the high ground of Scornan hill in County Tipperary, there is a graveyard where nobody left a name.
The site was recorded as a burial ground in the Ordnance Survey letters, yet not a single headstone with an inscription has ever been found there. What survives instead is a low scrap of earth and stone bank, barely half a metre high, visible only along the south-east to east edge of the enclosure. Everywhere else, the boundary has been levelled. Pieces of bare rock protrude through the grass immediately around the ruined church, and these outcrops may be the only above-ground traces of the people buried beneath.
The graveyard is sub-rectangular in shape, measuring roughly 53 metres north to south and 36 metres east to west, with the church positioned at its southern end, as shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map. The hill commands good views in all directions, which may explain why this particular patch of elevated ground attracted settlement as well as burial. About 380 metres to the north-west stand the remains of a tower house, its associated bawn (a walled enclosure, typically used for livestock or defence, that formed part of a late medieval fortified complex), and a deserted settlement. Together, these features suggest a community that once had some presence and organisation in this landscape, even if almost nothing of it now reads clearly from ground level. The OS letters that first described the burial ground were compiled and later published by Michael O'Flanagan in 1930, drawing on nineteenth-century fieldwork, so the absence of inscribed markers was already noted long before the site attracted further attention.