Grave Yd, Kilfeakle Churchquarter, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
The graveyard at Kilfeakle, in County Tipperary, has quietly absorbed the material of its own past.
Cut and dressed stones, almost certainly salvaged from the original church fabric, have been built into the modern boundary wall, so that what looks like ordinary stonework is in fact a kind of archive, earlier construction repurposed into something functional and enduring. It is the sort of detail easy to walk past without noticing.
The site sits on a level plateau, with the church positioned along its northern edge. Its shape, as recorded on the first Ordnance Survey six-inch map of 1840, is sub-rectangular, running roughly 66 metres east to west and widening as it goes, from around 30 metres at its narrowest to about 42 metres further east. The earliest headstone that has been positively identified dates to 1730 and is dedicated to someone of the Loobey family; unusually, it survives inside the church rather than in the open ground of the graveyard itself. Writing in 1892, a local historian named White noted that the ruins of the old Parish Chapel stood between the graveyard and the road running from Cashel to Tipperary, a detail that places at least one additional layer of ecclesiastical history on this relatively compact site. The presence of those dressed stones in the wall suggests that whatever stood here before was gradually dismantled and absorbed rather than simply abandoned.