Grave Yard, Killaloan, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard in Co. Tipperary is not unusual in itself, but the one at Killaloan has a particular quality of layering that rewards attention.
Sitting on a south-facing slope with the River Suir running roughly two hundred metres to the south, the site arranges itself around a medieval church that still anchors the southern edge of a roughly square enclosure, about 65 metres north to south and 78 metres east to west, all bounded by a stone wall. The church is a ruin, and the ground around it has been accumulating burials across several centuries, each generation leaving its own mark in stone.
The oldest dateable graveslabs here sit close to the church itself. One to the south-west carries a date of 1727, and another to the west is marked 1786. Inside the enclosure, 18th and 19th-century gravestones are scattered throughout, the earliest among them reading either 1753 or 1755, the inscription apparently worn enough to leave some ambiguity. Immediately east of the church's east gable, collapsed stone and concrete edging suggests a 19th-century burial plot of a slightly more formal kind, the concrete edging being a relatively modest domestic touch that was common in Irish graveyards of that period as families began to demarcate their plots more deliberately. Both this collapsed edging and the rubble masonry around it have been heavily overtaken by vegetation, so that the outlines of that later plot are now more sensed than clearly seen.