Grave Yard, Lanespark, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Lanespark, Co. Tipperary

A small graveyard sitting on a natural rock outcrop in County Tipperary sounds straightforward enough, until you look more closely at the northern wall.

At Lanespark, the boundary wall of the burial ground and the ruined church it encloses appear to have got into something of an architectural argument, and nobody has yet settled who won. It is genuinely unclear whether the graveyard's northern wall was built directly on top of the church's original northern wall, or whether the church wall once extended further out and was simply demolished to make way for it.

The graveyard itself is rectangular, measuring roughly 45 metres north to south and 37 metres east to west, enclosed by a wall about a metre high and less than half a metre thick. The enclosing wall was probably constructed in the nineteenth century, and the working theory is that whoever built it along the northern side may have pulled down part of the older church in the process, either out of convenience or indifference. The church, which occupies the northern quadrant of the graveyard, is now ruinous and heavily covered in ivy, making it impossible to examine the stonework beneath and settle the question one way or the other. The situation is complicated further by the presence of a quarry immediately to the north of the graveyard wall, suggesting that the landscape immediately around the site has been considerably altered over time. Inside the church's surviving shell, several large twentieth-century burial monuments have been placed, giving the ruin a layered quality where different centuries of use sit in close proximity without much acknowledgement of one another.

The site sits in open grassland with clear views in all directions, the elevated rock outcrop giving it a quiet prominence in the surrounding countryside. The ivy that blankets the church walls is both the site's most atmospheric feature and its most frustrating one, concealing whatever structural evidence might finally resolve the question of what happened to that northern wall.

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