Grave Yard, Monearmore, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
A graveyard that once sheltered lime trees of extraordinary girth is now without a single one of them.
The burial ground at Monearmore sits on a natural rise in County Tipperary, its elevated position giving clear sightlines across the surrounding countryside in every direction. The enclosing wall, built from rubble sandstone and limestone, runs between one and a half and two and a half metres in height and encloses a rectangular space roughly 38 metres north to south and 47 metres east to west. Inside lie memorials from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the expected remains of a rural Irish Protestant burial ground. What is less expected is what is no longer there.
The Ordnance Survey letters, compiled in the 1830s as part of the broader topographical project that preceded the first edition six-inch maps, recorded several lime trees of considerable age growing within the graveyard. One of them measured nine and a half feet, approximately three metres, in diameter, a size that would suggest a tree of several centuries at least. Those trees are gone now, with no visible trace remaining. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1840 also shows a Protestant church occupying the northern quadrant of the graveyard, itself built on the site of an earlier church, suggesting this ground had been in continuous religious use for some time before the nineteenth century. Within a short distance to the north and north-east lie two holy wells and the remains of a castle, a clustering of features that points to this having been a place of some local significance across a long period.
The site is surrounded by enough associated remains, including the castle roughly 270 metres to the north-east, to reward anyone willing to read the landscape as a whole rather than focus on any single element. The absent trees, perhaps more than anything else here, give the place a quietly unresolved quality, a documented presence that has simply disappeared.