Grave Yard, Macreary, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
In the middle of a working tillage field in the Ivowen valley, County Tipperary, there is a patch of ground that nobody ploughs.
No fence marks it off, no sign explains it, and to a passing eye it might look like an oversight or an awkward corner left fallow. It is, in fact, the footprint of a vanished church and graveyard, preserved not by any formal designation but by the quiet decision of whoever works the land to leave that particular rectangle, roughly 38 metres by 45, untouched.
The site appears on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, where the graveyard is indicated by a dashed boundary line rather than a solid one, a convention that suggests it was already unenclosed at that point, open to the surrounding land without wall or ditch to define it. The church itself, which once stood along the northern edge of the graveyard towards its western end, had already disappeared from the physical landscape by the time the OS surveyors came through. No masonry survives above ground, and neither church nor graves are visible at surface level today. The flat terrain of the valley, with a small stream running north to south some fifty metres to the east, would have made this a quietly practical location for a rural parish site, close to water and set on even ground.
