Grave Yard, Strike, Co. Tipperary

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Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Strike, Co. Tipperary

At Strike in County Tipperary, a graveyard sits within its own earthen enclosure, the kind of boundary that speaks to a much older logic of sacred space than a simple stone wall would suggest.

The enclosure is sub-rectangular in shape, roughly 45 metres east to west and varying between 25 and 40 metres north to south, and the banks that define it are substantial: the northern bank alone is nearly 12 metres wide, rising to an internal height of about one and a half metres. These are not incidental earthworks but deliberate constructions, and they give the site a quality of being contained, set apart, marked out from the surrounding fields in a way that predates any modern notion of a churchyard boundary.

The current entrance is a small gate at the south-west, set in a post and wire fence that runs along the southern and western sides, just outside the line of the earthen enclosure. The northern side is now defined by a stone field boundary that already appeared on the second edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, surveyed between 1903 and 1904, suggesting the enclosure's original edges have been gradually absorbed into ordinary agricultural boundaries over the past century or more. The original entrance has not been identified. Within the interior, a church ruin stands among tall grass and nettles, with mature deciduous trees growing along the tops of the banks, their roots binding the earthworks that have outlasted whatever congregation once gathered here.

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