Grave Yard, Kilbraugh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At Kilbraugh, on flat grassland at the north-western foot of the Slievardagh hills, a graveyard has been disappearing for at least two centuries.
By 1840, the antiquarian John O'Donovan was already describing it as a site that had been effaced, a place more absence than presence. What remains today is a single earthen scarp, roughly one metre high and twenty metres long, marking the western edge of what was once a burial ground. It stops, merges quietly into the surrounding field, and offers no further definition. On the Ordnance Survey six-inch map the enclosure is shown as triangular in outline, an unusual shape for a burial ground, though the ground itself no longer confirms it.
Local tradition holds that a church once stood here alongside the graves, and certain low rock outcrops in the field have been pointed to as its possible remains. No structural evidence has been found to support this, and the outcrops have not yielded any stonework that could be confidently identified as ecclesiastical. The field around the site carries a number of undulations which may reflect quarrying or agricultural disturbance over the years rather than any buried features of the monument itself. Two fields to the east, the faint trace of an old disused road survives, a detail that hints at a landscape once more organised and inhabited than it now appears. A separate enclosure lies some 360 metres to the east, though its relationship to the burial ground is unclear.