Graveyard, Aghnameadle, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Aghnameadle, Co. Tipperary

One of the more quietly unsettling details at the ruined church in Aghnameadle is the fate of its main doorway.

The two-centred arch that once served as the principal entrance to the medieval building was lifted from its original position at the western end of the south wall and reinstalled as the entrance to the MacEgan family tomb, an eighteenth or nineteenth-century monument standing nearby. Stone robbing was common enough in rural Ireland, but the reuse of an entire doorway, relocated and repurposed within the same graveyard, gives this site an oddly layered quality, where medieval fabric has been quietly absorbed into later funerary architecture.

The church itself sits on the western bank of the Ollatrim River, with a tower house, the kind of fortified residence that was typical of late medieval Gaelic and Anglo-Norman lordships, visible to the south-east. The building is a long rectangular structure, put together in roughly coursed rubble, and its survival is partial but legible. The east and south walls remain intact, with only the eastern end of the north wall still standing and the west wall reduced to footings at ground level. What survives of the windows is enough to date the building to the later medieval period: the east wall retains a partially destroyed twin-light ogee-headed window, where the ogee is a double-curved arch fashionable in Irish ecclesiastical architecture from the fourteenth century onwards. There was also a single-light window at the eastern end of the south wall, though this is now destroyed. The church appears in the ecclesiastical taxation of the Diocese of Killaloe recorded in 1302, placing it firmly within the medieval parish landscape of Tipperary at a moment when such surveys were being used to systematically assess church revenues across Ireland.

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