Grave Yard, Tulla, Co. Clare

Co. Clare |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Tulla, Co. Clare

The graveyard crowning Tulla Hill at the eastern edge of the Co. Clare village is an unusual layering of the dead across many centuries, all contained within a single ecclesiastical enclosure that has been quietly accumulating history since the medieval period.

What appears at first glance to be an ordinary rural burial ground turns out to hold a medieval church, an early eighteenth-century church, and the site of a castle within the same bounded hilltop space, with views across rolling pasture opening out in every direction. The hill itself seems to have drawn settlement and sanctity together in a way that left each successive era building on, or simply folding around, what came before.

The oldest visible layer of the graveyard takes the form of a D-shaped enclosure, roughly 62 metres on its longer axis, defined by a rubble limestone masonry wall. This shape was already recorded on the 1841 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and the northern wall of that enclosure may actually incorporate stonework from the medieval church on the site. Alongside that older structure stands a church dating to 1702, and the earliest commemorative inscription yet identified in the graveyard is a wall plaque on the south side of its shallow chancel, placed there by or for the Browne family in 1717. The graveyard was extended to the north-east and then further around the enclosure in subsequent decades, the later phases marked by a low rubble stone wall with vertical copings, some of which have been replaced in poured concrete. The modern graveyard, occupying the northern half of the enclosure, was established around 1975. Older grave plots, mainly from the nineteenth century with occasional eighteenth-century examples, concentrate within the historic D-shaped section to the south-west.

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