Grave Yard, Milltown Britton, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that looks like a field is not unusual in Ireland, but this one near Milltown Britton in County Tipperary has been quietly erasing itself from the landscape for well over a century.
There are no headstones, no upright markers, no visible indication that the ground underfoot ever served as a place of burial. The whole site sits under open grass, its oval outline the only clue that something deliberate once occupied this space.
The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, published in 1840, recorded the enclosure clearly, hachured and labelled as a graveyard. The enclosure is substantial, measuring roughly 74 metres north to south and 55 metres east to west, which suggests a site of some local significance rather than a small family plot. By the time the revised edition appeared in 1906, the map itself indicates disuse, and the physical evidence on the ground had apparently already begun to disappear. The same 1906 map also marks a church site in the eastern part of the enclosure, the two features bound together in the way that ecclesiastical and burial sites so often are across the Irish countryside, where a medieval or early Christian church and its associated graveyard formed the nucleus of a community that may long since have dispersed or relocated.