Graveyard, Borrisland, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Graveyard, Borrisland, Co. Tipperary

At the western end of Borrisoleigh, a graveyard occupies ground that was once home to a church, though the church itself has simply vanished from the record.

What the 1840 Ordnance Survey map shows as an upstanding building had, by the 1904 edition of the same survey, disappeared entirely, leaving the burial ground without its centrepiece and without any clear explanation of what happened in between.

Samuel Lewis, writing in his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland in 1837, noted ruins of a church at Borrisoleigh, which suggests the building was already in poor repair by the mid-nineteenth century. Whether it collapsed, was demolished, or was simply robbed of its stone for other purposes is not known. More uncertain still is the question of how old the site actually is. Despite being a functioning graveyard on recognisable ecclesiastical ground, there is no firm evidence that a church here predates 1700. The earliest documentary thread connecting the area to any institutional presence comes from 1302, when a taxation record for the Diocese of Cashel records revenue collected from the "burgage of Leth", a burgage being a plot of land held in a medieval town under a particular form of tenure. That reference places some kind of organised settlement in the vicinity during the medieval period, but whether it had any direct relationship to the graveyard site is another question the surviving evidence cannot answer.

The result is a place defined largely by what is absent: a church recorded, then ruined, then gone, set within a graveyard that may or may not mark a site of genuine antiquity. That gap between what maps show and what survives on the ground is, in its own way, the most interesting thing about it.

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