Kilclispeen Graveyard, Ahenny, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Kilclispeen Graveyard, Ahenny, Co. Tipperary

At Ahenny in County Tipperary, a graveyard and its associated church occupy the same gentle east-facing slope but do not share the same enclosure.

The two sit roughly twenty metres apart, the graveyard walled off into its own roughly square boundary while the church remains outside it, unenclosed. This separation of the dead from the building nominally serving them is quietly unusual, a small puzzle written into the local landscape.

The first Ordnance Survey mapping of the area, carried out around 1840, recorded the graveyard but showed no wall around it. By the time the second edition was produced in 1906, a stone enclosure had been added, giving the site the defined, roughly square footprint it presents today. That intervening period saw the wall built without drawing the church inside the boundary, a decision whose reasoning is no longer obvious. The site sits on a natural terrace in undulating terrain, the kind of subtle topographic feature that would have made it a sensible place for a religious settlement in the first instance.

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