Grave Yard, Kilcoolyabbey, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At Kilcoolyabbey in County Tipperary, a graveyard quietly occupies a north-to-south rise, its boundary on the early Ordnance Survey maps drawn as a D-shaped outline in dashed lines, as though the cartographers themselves were uncertain how to classify it.
The site is unenclosed in any formal sense, yet a low stone wall with a gate marks its northwest edge, separating it from a farm roadway and from a newer church built just sixty metres or so to the northwest. That proximity tells the story immediately: this older ground was not abandoned so much as superseded.
The church here is thought to date to the early eighteenth century, though it may have origins in the late seventeenth. The earliest documentary evidence placing a church at this spot is an estate map from 1749, cited by Neely. By 1826, the building was already in trouble; a contemporary record describes it as 'falling in and too small, and graves too close to the walls', a phrase that conjures something between a structural survey and a complaint. Three years later, in 1829, the new church was constructed to the northwest, leaving the older structure and its graveyard to settle into a different kind of use. A large pyramidal mausoleum from the nineteenth century sits on the line of the south wall of the old church, the kind of assertive funerary monument that marks wealth as much as loss. The headstones, most of them clustered to the south and west of the church ruin, span from 1767 through to 1957, the majority belonging to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with only a handful from the twentieth.
The high limestone wall running northwest to southeast about two metres northeast of the east gable is one of the more quietly puzzling features of the site. Its relationship to the church ruin and the graveyard boundary is not immediately obvious from ground level, and it gives the space an irregular, layered quality that repays a slow look around.