Kilmanavogue Grave Yard, Jessfield, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Kilmanavogue Grave Yard, Jessfield, Co. Tipperary

A graveyard that has lost its entrance is a peculiar thing.

At Kilmanavogue, on gently sloping upland ground in County Tipperary, an oval enclosure sits in open grassland with the Munster river running about eighty metres to the east. The boundary is an earthen bank, low and worn, measuring roughly thirty metres across on its northwest-to-southeast axis and thirty-eight metres east to west. A public road cuts straight through the eastern side on a north-to-south line, flattening the bank where it crosses. No original entrance can be identified anywhere along the perimeter. Inside, a few scattered stones may mark burials, though no inscriptions or formal monuments survive. The outer fosse, a shallow defensive or boundary ditch that would originally have run around the outside of the enclosure, is now barely traceable on the southern side alone.

By the time the Ordnance Survey produced its six-inch map in 1840, the site was already recorded as a graveyard, though even then a field boundary cut across its southern edge on an east-to-west axis, suggesting the land around it was being reorganised with little deference to what lay there. Sometime between that survey and a revised edition produced in 1906, the graveyard fell out of use entirely. The later map marks it as disused, meaning the community it once served had either dispersed, moved to another burial ground, or simply ceased to maintain it during the second half of the nineteenth century, a period of considerable upheaval in rural Ireland. Whatever congregation or settlement gave Kilmanavogue its purpose had moved on, leaving the enclosure to slowly subside into the surrounding grass.

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