Grave Yard, Shanbally, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Shanbally, Co. Tipperary

Among the gravestones at this quiet Tipperary burial ground, one object stands out as quietly out of place: a limestone mullion, the kind of slender vertical dividing bar normally found in a window frame, has been planted upright in the ground and pressed into service as a grave marker.

It is a small but telling piece of improvisation, a fragment of worked stone salvaged from some earlier structure and given a second purpose among the dead.

The graveyard sits on the north side of a gentle natural rise in undulating pastureland, with the associated church roughly at its centre. The enclosure is sub-rectangular in plan, measuring approximately 55 metres north-east to south-west and 53 metres north-west to south-east, giving it an almost square footprint. A narrow laneway leads up to the site, entering at the south-west angle. The gravestones themselves are mostly early nineteenth century and later, though a handful date to the late eighteenth century, suggesting the site was in active use across a period of considerable local change. The reused mullion fits this pattern loosely; when an older building fell out of use or fell apart, its dressed stone did not simply disappear but found its way into the fabric of everyday life, and in this case, into the marking of a grave.

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Pete F
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