Grave Yard, Loughlohery, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
What strikes a visitor first about the graveyard at Loughlohery is how tidy it is, and how quiet.
The grass is closely cropped, the enclosure is well-kept, and yet there are almost no headstones. For a graveyard associated with a medieval church, the near-absence of visible markers gives the place an unusual, slightly stripped quality, as if the dead have been quietly tidied away along with everything else.
The site sits on a gentle west-facing slope of a ridge in rolling County Tipperary pasture, a rectangular enclosure measuring roughly 27 metres north to south and 50 metres east to west. At its centre stands the remains of Loughlohery medieval church, the kind of small rural church that once served scattered farming communities across Ireland before the upheavals of the post-Reformation centuries. The surrounding stone wall has been crudely repointed in places, suggesting ongoing but uneven maintenance over the years. The headstones that do survive date to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the earliest legible inscription going back to 1790, which means the commemorative record here is relatively shallow even by the standards of Irish rural graveyards. Whatever burials preceded that date have left no lasting marker above ground.