Grave Yard, Outeragh, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
Among the headstones clustered just outside what was once the south wall of a ruined church in Outeragh, one marker is not quite what it appears.
A corbel, the kind of projecting stone block used in medieval construction to support a beam or vault overhead, has been lifted from the fabric of the building and pressed into service as a grave marker. It is a small, quietly telling detail: the church itself becoming material for the commemoration of the dead who surrounded it.
The graveyard sits on a gentle rise amid pasture, roughly rectangular at 46 metres north to south and 59 metres east to west, its boundary formed by an earthen bank faced with stone on both sides. Mature beech trees line most of the perimeter, with scrub taking over along the western edge. Entry is through a wrought-iron gate set towards the western end of the north boundary. The church ruin sits roughly central within the enclosure. The earliest legible headstone carries a date of 1767, though the site is certainly older. Immediately east of the church's east gable stands a table-top tomb above a vault. According to the Ordnance Survey Letters compiled by O'Flanagan in 1830, this tomb was raised in memory of Michael Keating of Cahir, a town lying a short distance to the south along the old Cork road that runs past the site. Table-top tombs of this kind, sometimes called altar tombs, were typically reserved for families of local consequence, the raised slab and enclosed vault signalling a degree of standing that a simple headstone could not convey.