Grave Yard, St. Johnstown, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, St. Johnstown, Co. Tipperary

Beneath the current boundary wall of this small Tipperary graveyard, an earlier edge survives as a low earthen scarp, still visible running roughly parallel to the north and west sides, about three metres inside the present enclosure.

That interior ridge, standing to around 0.95 metres, is all that remains of the graveyard's original boundary, predating the stone wall that eventually replaced it. It is a quiet kind of layering, one enclosure ghost-written inside another, and it goes unannounced.

The graveyard sits on flat valley floor ground, with hills rising to the north-east, east, and south, and a farmyard pressing in from the west. It is roughly rectangular, measuring about 32 metres north to south and 43 metres east to west, with the ruined church occupying the north-west quadrant and headstones concentrated toward the south side and the eastern end. A tower house, the kind of late medieval fortified residence common across Munster and Connacht, stands roughly 110 metres to the south-west, close enough to suggest the two sites shared the same local world for several centuries. The Ordnance Survey letters, compiled by O'Flanagan in 1930 drawing on earlier fieldwork, recorded the graveyard as still 'much in use' at the time of survey, enclosed then by a low stone wall that had already suffered damage on its south-west and west sides, the loose stones stacked back in place but uncemented, giving the boundary a provisional, ongoing quality that seems to suit a site still accumulating its dead.

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