Grave Yard, Killenaule, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Killenaule, Co. Tipperary

In the graveyard at Killenaule, on the south side of River Street, five pieces of medieval stonework are doing quiet duty as grave-markers.

Each fragment, all limestone, includes a mullion, two other window fragments, and two pieces that may once have been door jambs, salvaged from some earlier structure and pressed into service to mark the dead. It is a small, odd detail that speaks to centuries of material recycling, the kind that happens when a community pulls usable stone from a ruined building and puts it to whatever purpose is nearest to hand.

The graveyard, roughly square in plan and measuring about 46 metres north to south by 48 metres east to west, slopes away to the east and south of the church that now occupies its highest point. That church is a 19th-century building, raised on the footprint of an 18th-century predecessor, but the site itself is considerably older. The Down Survey, a systematic mapping of Ireland carried out between 1655 and 1658, includes an illustration that suggests a church already stood here well before either of those structures. A motte and bailey, a form of early medieval fortification consisting of a raised earthen mound paired with an enclosed courtyard, sits 173 metres to the north-east, hinting at the kind of settled, layered landscape where ecclesiastical and defensive uses grew up alongside one another. The medieval stone fragments in the graveyard almost certainly came from whatever earlier church occupied this rise, though no record specifies exactly when or how they were incorporated as markers among the 18th and 19th-century memorials that now fill the enclosure.

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