Grave Yard, Lisronagh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A small rectangular graveyard in County Tipperary manages to compress several centuries of Irish religious and military history into a single, quietly layered site.
Directly to the south of the burial ground stands a tower house, the compact fortified residence that became the dominant form of elite architecture in late medieval Ireland, and the juxtaposition of castle ruin and churchyard gives the place an atmosphere that is less dramatic than simply accumulative, one era quietly pressing against another.
The medieval church that once anchored the site was eventually superseded by a Church of Ireland building constructed around 1831, though that later structure has itself since fallen into ruin. Writing in 1907, historian Power noted the survival of ancient church remains alongside what he described as a small, square, and well-preserved castle ruin. Set against the east gable of the nineteenth-century ruin is a late medieval graveslab, a carved funerary stone of the type produced in Ireland broadly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, which now sits as something of an orphaned object, its original context long displaced by the successive rounds of building and decay around it.