Graveyard, Garryvicleheen, Co. Tipperary
Co. Tipperary |
Burial Grounds
On the western edge of Thurles, just beyond the old walled town boundary and beside the railway line, there is a graveyard where a church once stood, though by the time the Ordnance Survey visited in 1840 not a single trace of it remained above ground.
What survives instead is something more fragmentary and, in its way, more curious: a large stone pier built into the southern wall of the graveyard, into which a collection of carved architectural fragments has been embedded like a cabinet of salvaged curiosities.
The pier holds several pieces, most of relatively recent origin, but among them is something older and more architecturally telling: a section of ogee-headed window with hollowed spandrels. An ogee arch is one with a double curve, concave below and convex above, a form common in late medieval ecclesiastical building in Ireland, and this fragment almost certainly belonged to the vanished church of St Bridget that once stood on the site. Alongside it, carved figures of a cat, a lion, and a human figure have been set into the same wall. The church itself is recorded by O'Flanagan, writing in 1930, as having been located outside the walled medieval town of Thurles, which places it in a position consistent with many early church foundations that predated or sat apart from later urban development. Whether the carved figures are medieval survivals or later additions is not entirely clear from what is known of the site, but their presence alongside a genuine architectural remnant gives the wall an oddly assembled, almost collaged quality.
The graveyard sits on the north side of the Garryvicleheen road, and the stone pier in the southern wall is the main thing to seek out. The church it commemorates is otherwise entirely absent, its fabric apparently long since dispersed or buried, leaving only these embedded fragments as a record of what was once there.




