Grave Yard, Magorban, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Among the more quietly peculiar features of the graveyard at Magorban is a table tomb raised on stone spheres, a rather unusual piece of funerary furniture that sits to the west of the existing church.
Chest tombs stand to the east of the same building, and a mausoleum with a double-pitched roof occupies the western end of the enclosure, giving the whole site a layered, slightly theatrical quality that is easy to miss at first glance. The graveyard is a roughly rectangular area, approximately sixty metres north to south and fifty metres east to west, enclosed by a rubble stone wall with an entrance pierced through the east end of the north side.
The early nineteenth-century church sits off-centre to the north of the enclosure, itself surrounded by nineteenth-century gravestones. Scattered across the open ground to the south, later headstones are interspersed with occasional examples from the late eighteenth century, the earliest recorded belonging to one Thomas Bourke, dated 1784. Low, uninscribed grave markers appear throughout the site, the kind of plain fieldstone slabs that predate the widespread fashion for inscribed headstones and often mark burials considerably older than anything written on the more prominent monuments. Beneath the existing church may lie the remains of an earlier ecclesiastical building, and possible foundations of a small structure have been identified to the south of the current church, suggesting that what visitors see today is only the most recent arrangement of a site with a longer and less legible history behind it.