Graveyard, Cooneen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
At a ruined church in Cooneen, County Tipperary, children were still being buried inside the walls of the building as late as 1840.
That detail, recorded in the Ordnance Survey Name Books of that year, gives the site an atmosphere that goes beyond ordinary ruin. The practice was not unique to Ireland, but it was far from universal, and it points to a persistent local attachment to the space long after the structure itself had fallen into collapse.
The church stands at the eastern end of an east-west ridge in open pasture, positioned just off the crest so that the ground drops sharply to the south towards the Nenagh River below. It was built from limestone rubble and is largely collapsed, with the north wall surviving as the most substantial remaining section. The site appears in the ecclesiastical taxation records of the Diocese of Killaloe in 1302, which places it within a network of medieval parish churches operating across Munster at that time, each assessed for tax purposes by the Church. The first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, produced in the nineteenth century, shows the church enclosed within a trapezoidal boundary, marked simply as a burial ground. Traces of that enclosure wall survive to the west and northeast of the church, though no burials are visible outside the structure itself. Some of the loose stones scattered inside the collapsed walls may originally have served as grave markers for the children interred there.
