Grave Yard, Mortlestown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Mortlestown, Co. Tipperary

At the entrance to this graveyard in Mortlestown, one of the gate piers quietly incorporates a carved limestone jamb that almost certainly once framed a doorway or window of the church it guards.

It is a small, easy-to-miss detail, but it points to a site where the fabric of an older building has been redistributed rather than simply lost, with fragments reused, propped against walls, and slowly swallowed by grass and thorn.

The church itself sits roughly at the centre of an irregularly shaped enclosure, approximately fifty metres north to south and fifty-two metres east to west, on a gentle east-facing slope with pasture beyond the walls. The visible headstones are 18th century in date, clustered to the south of the church ruin, with a single exception to the east. What survives of the church is fragmentary: the inner face of the south wall stands only two courses high in places, and rubble has been tipped at the east end, obscuring the original wall width entirely. Arranged along the external face of the north wall, however, is a collection of architectural stonework, all limestone, that speaks to the ambition of the original building. There are chamfered jambs from doors or windows, the curved head of a doorway with a chamfered edge, and a broken ogee-headed window moulding, the ogee being a double-curved profile common in late medieval Irish ecclesiastical architecture. These pieces were not built into the wall; they have been placed against it, gathered from somewhere on the site and set aside, though the grass cover that has accumulated over the rubble makes it difficult now to read the full picture.

The enclosing stone wall is largely obscured by thorn bushes growing along its top, which gives the perimeter a dense, unkempt quality that contrasts with the lush grass within. Visitors willing to move slowly around the north wall will find the arranged stonework there the most informative part of the site, even in its displaced state.

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Pete F
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