Grave Yard, Modeshil, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Modeshil, Co. Tipperary

Sitting in open pasture on a low rise in south Tipperary, the graveyard at Modeshil holds one detail that quietly separates it from the many rural burial grounds scattered across the Irish midlands: a small, rectangular structure adjoining the ruined church on its northern side, its interior sunken below the surrounding ground, its walls reduced to low, sod-covered ridges.

Local tradition identifies this enclosure, roughly ten metres by six, as a famine burial plot. Whether or not that attribution can be formally confirmed, the physical form of the feature, set slightly apart from the main concentration of headstones, carries the particular atmosphere of ground set aside in haste and grief.

The graveyard as a whole occupies an irregularly shaped area of roughly forty metres east to west and thirty-eight metres north to south, enclosed by a wall dating from the eighteenth or nineteenth century, with cement rendering on its inner face and vertical coping stones still visible in sections. An entrance gate sits at the south-west. Inside, the ground is not entirely level; a steep scarp running roughly east to south-south-west, some 4.3 metres wide and 1.35 metres high, lies about 2.5 metres within the enclosing wall, suggesting that the site preserves earlier earthwork features beneath its later arrangement. The church itself sits off-centre to the north of this enclosed space. The oldest surviving headstone, bearing the name Cody and dated 1770, is located within the church rather than in the open burial ground, which is where the majority of nineteenth and twentieth century monuments are concentrated, mostly to the south of the church with smaller groupings to the east, west, and north.

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