Grave Yard, Tipper, Co. Kildare

Co. Kildare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Tipper, Co. Kildare

A roughly fifty-metre square of pasture in County Kildare contains, within a single stone enclosure, several centuries of Christian practice laid out almost casually side by side. There are the ruins of a fortified medieval church, a baptismal font from the same period, an Early Christian cross-slab, and a seventeenth-century Latin cross, all sharing the same walled ground with inscribed headstones ranging from the 1700s to the present day.

The site sits on a narrow, level terrace cut into a long, south-west-facing slope, a position that gives it a slightly set-apart quality even within the surrounding farmland. The cross-slab is the oldest layer visible here: such slabs, incised with a simple cross design, are associated with the early medieval Irish church and often mark the presence of a much earlier devotional site beneath or beside the later medieval structures. The fortified church is a different proposition entirely; fortified churches, which incorporated defensive features such as thick walls or raised entrances, were a practical response to an unstable landscape during the medieval period in Ireland. The baptismal font and the seventeenth-century Latin cross suggest the site remained in active religious use well into the post-medieval era. A survey recorded around fifty inscriptions across the graveyard, documented by McCabe in 1996, the earliest dating to the eighteenth century.

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